Epilepsy, Chorea and Involuntary Movements Onstage: The Politics and Aesthetics of Alterkinetic...

159About Performance No. 11 2012

EPILEPSy, ChOrEA, ANd INvOLuNTAry MOvEMENTS ONSTAgE: ThE POLITICS ANd AESThETICS OF

ALTErkINETIC dANCE

Kélina Gotman

On 11 and 12 December 2009, dancer and choreographer Rita Marcalo staged a twenty-four-hour event at the Bradford Playhouse, West Yorkshire, in which she abstained from her anti-epileptic medication, drank wine, ate chocolate, subjected herself to strobe lighting, and abstained from sleep.1 She called this event Involuntary Dances. Its aim was to enable her to trigger an epileptic seizure, for the benefit of a public gathered for the occasion, awaiting the fit, which never came. The performance-part of a trilogy of works exploring epilepsy, drugs, and movement—provoked a furore among medical professionals and members of the arts community: Marcalo was accused of exploiting her condition, making poor art, failing to raise awareness about epilepsy, and wasting funds. This essay argues that her performance, on the contrary, contributes to a long legacy of public demonstrations of epilepsy, chorea, and other epileptiform neurological disorders onstage, not least at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Jean-Martin Charcot’s famous Leçons du mardi. A cast of medical students, artists and writers attended these lecture-performances in the late nineteenth century, contributing to what Rae Beth Gordon has described as the emergence of epileptic singers on cabaret stages across Europe, convulsing, twitching, and jerking their bodies from the Moulin Rouge to the new comic cinema (Gordon 2003, 626ff; Gordon 2001, 534ff). But Marcalo’s “dances,” also indebted to a legacy of medical (and body) performance art from Orlan to Franko B, position her as the author of her epileptic spectacle, reversing the authorial role as well as the performer’s status as freak and “other.” In doing so, she is extending the conversation on medicalised bodies, ownership, voyeurism, and privacy to the edges of dance.

What this essay further argues is that her work can be considered alongside a range of contemporary dance-theatre pieces exploring dyskinesia and involuntary movement, from the Ballets C de la B’s exploration of hysteria in Out of Context: For Pina (2010) to the Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s use of medical appendages

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Epilepsy, Brain, and Mind Con-gress in Prague, 2010, in the plenary on Art and Epilepsy. I am grateful to Dr Marilyn Jones-Gotman, Dr Ivan Rektor, and Dr Amos Korczyn for their invitation.

160

Kélina Gotman

and prostheses in bODY_rEMIX / gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS (2010) and Wayne McGregor’s collaborative projects investigating movement disorders and cognitive processes such as in AtaXia (2004). These works suggest what I am describing as a choreographic turn in contemporary dance-theatre, shifting the movement landscape from what André Lepecki (2006) has called the “exhausted” dance of the 1980s and 1990s—in which rupture, silence, and stillness present dramaturgies of failure—to a heightened, tense, ecstatic embracing of extra-daily movements that might appear diseased, disorderly, or marginal. These alterkinetic dances, borrowing from neurology, hysteria, and psychiatric disorders, re-articulate the body’s regimens while offering a polymorphic movement vocabulary.2

As I am arguing, dyskinetic gestures, when recuperated into a dance fold, offer a rich, broad, complex movement language, defying normalcy and notions of beauty; their use attempts, for better or for worse, to complicate the aesthetics of the banal. Performers performing their disability and choreographers borrowing the movement languages of dyskinesia integrate classical approaches to movement with gestures drawn from non-dance fields, including medicine, arguably the ultimate repository of gestural abnormality. These integrated movements present an expanded and messy sense of the everyday, passing through the legacy of the contemporary dance and performance anti-aesthetic to arrive at a heteroclite conception of the virtuosic and the disordered, or the disorderly and the mundane. And yet, paradoxically, this is the mundane of those for whom movement, voluntary and involuntary, presents particular challenges every day.3

These disorders of motion, when heightened in dance, present the antithesis to the sort of contemporary choreographic work that Lepecki describes as being still or silent. Hypomania involves muscle spasms and psychomotor agitation; chorea describes involuntary, jerky movements of the arms, legs and/or face; and myoclonus brings a sudden contraction of the muscles. Not all necessarily occur with speed or intensity; indeed, these gestural hiccups can be halting as well. But

2 I use the term alterkinetic as separate to the medicalised dyskinetic to signal the performative and/or aesthetic use of dyskinetic movements onstage (broadly construed).

3 People suffering from movement disorders—involuntary, often spastic, repetitive, or distorted ges-tures found in psychiatric conditions such as hypomania and, more frequently, neuromotor disorders involving tics, chorea, and myoclonus—have difficulty performing regular muscle movements; control and fluidity are continually at stake. These disorders can be enormously distressing but are very com-mon: Parkinson’s disease alone affects in the order of 120,000 persons in the United Kingdom. See http://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/about_our_research.aspx/. While the dancers I discuss here develop dyskinetic or alterkinetic vocabularies to shift and to enrich the range of their own move-ments in theatrical spaces, the most common conditions such as Parkinson’s have also become the focus of public engagement projects among companies including the Mark Morris Dance Group, whose Dance for Parkinson’s Disease brings dance (or brings dance back) to those who suffer from this and related conditions. See http://markmorrisdancegroup.org/the_dance_center/outreach/ and http://danceforparkinsons.org/.

161

Epilepsy, Chorea, and Involuntary Movements Onstage

these movements, when framed or reconfigured onstage, offer a gestural irregularity that goes against classical symmetry—and its postmodern rejection. At the same time, these movements quote, while transforming, the language of hysteria, and the hysterical body of the nineteenth-century ballets, romanticised, as McCarren (1998) has argued, in the madness of Giselle. Here, dancers and choreographers performing or borrowing from dyskinetic movement vocabularies are shifting dance into a space where mundane disorders of motion become performance existing between virtuosity and spectacular action—characterised by feats that defy the body’s normal mechanisms; and the vulnerability of an unwilled loss of motor control. All of this is wrapped back into an expanded dance fold to ask, once again, what dance is and what it can be.

Indeed, these are body failures seen as such only through a normalising gaze; even if Marcalo’s performance “failed” (she never had her seizure), the notion of failing, “bad” (improperly functioning), or disordered bodies can be set theatrically in motion through figures of display and the dramatisation of the mundane. If this is not quite activist theatre, it opens up new horizons for considering movement and disorders of motion—in and outside dance—in a new light.

ChArCOT’S TuESdAy LESSONS: EPILEPSy ONSTAgE AT ThE SALPêTrIèrEJean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), the first chaired Professor of Neurology, presented hysterical, hystero-epileptic, and epileptiform (epilepsy-resembling) seizures onstage to an audience of medical students, writers, and artists attending his legendary Tuesday Lessons at the Salpêtrière. He did so with flair, wheeling patients out whose cases were to be discussed, prodding them and declaring, “I am holding an arm, I am pinching a leg,” while he described the action being performed: “See here, how this goes.” His imperative use of language actualised and dramatised his medical authority through speech acts that displayed while they provoked. As Georges Didi-Huberman (2003) has argued, Charcot used a theatrical (and a photographic) technique to stage his case studies, creating dramatic portraits of patients as he brought on their symptoms through stimulation and suggestion.4

While Charcot has often been chastised (if not parodied) in critical literature and theatrical representations such as the New Stage Theatre Company’s Some Historic/Some Hysteric (2006) (Gotman 2007, 66ff), what is less frequently noted are the performative utterances and dramaturgical arcs that characterised his neurological extravaganzas, and arguably set the stage for future medical performances.5 In

4 On Charcot’s influential (and spectacular) use of visual iconography, see, for example, Schade (1995), Goetz (1991), and Aubert (2005).

5 Charcot’s famous theatricality is discussed in some depth by Marshall (2002, 2003, 2007) and Justice-Malloy (1995).

162

Kélina Gotman

his lecture on “Tremors and Choreïform Movements—Rhythmical Chorea” in his Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System (1888), he cites the case of Flor—, a young woman who had been under his care for more than six months, and whose case, he thought, merited “more attentive study” (Charcot 1991, 190). Following a brief account of her life—including two early marriages, three children, an “irritable temper,” and an uninteresting hereditary history—as well as a brief description of her symptoms, which included a swelling in the stomach, pulsation, a ball in the throat, lethargy, crying, vomiting blood, etc.—Charcot suggested that her case represented “the stigmata of the great neurosis” (191). His language was dramatic. He addressed his audience repeatedly, calling them “gentlemen” (messieurs) and proceeding to exhibit her case through indirect address and theatrical gesture.

Indeed, Flor— was brought into the auditorium to serve as a live case study. The record of his lecture suggests that he triggered her performance while speaking over it, pushing or pulling her limbs to provoke the seizure on the stage. “The induced attacks can be obtained,” he explained,

by pulling on the left arm, or by striking with a hammer on one or other patella tendon such as I am now doing. When you have excited the attack by means of pulling the left arm, that arm immediately commences performing rapid rhythmical movements in which the patient seems to be whipping eggs. (192, emphasis added)

His narrative continued, as did the hapless demonstration. The lively, dramatic comparison he made between her involuntary movements and those of orators and dancing “Tsiganes” furthered the dramatic quality of her performance (ibid.). While he noted that “you can question her during the attack and she will reply to you that she does not suffer; that she is simply fatigued, and inconvenienced by violent palpitations” (ibid.), Flor— was nowhere addressed directly, but kept, it seems, silently to her role as actor or mime (if not puppet). What this case suggests is that Flor—, in Charcot’s theatre, operated as a metonym, whipping eggs when her arm was pulled and standing in for the condition that she illustrated.

Because “rhythmical chorea”—a form of chorea minor, or localised movement disorder here involving “rhythmical, systematic” (183) movements often allied with “the movements of ordinary life or of professional gesture” (ibid.)—is largely involuntary, the movements performed by these patients are unlikely to have been triggered by Charcot’s words or actions alone. Rather, these conditions, “generally allied to hysteria” (ibid.), enabled Charcot to present medical displays that teetered between semi-voluntary gestures (triggered through suggestion and prodding) and involuntary ones, comical, in his hysteroepileptic theatre, on account of the body’s loss of control. The case of Deb— is telling. Deb—, as we learn, was a sixty-seven-year-old post-menopausal patient suffering from hysteroepilepsy, which Charcot described as a condition having all the appearances of epilepsy (it was epileptiform),

163


but whose cause was hysterical: it involved no degenerative tissue and no brain lesion, just the overwhelming work of the imagination. While Deb— no longer showed signs of “real” hysteria and, as Charcot claimed, “there is nothing else to be discovered in her except a great susceptibility to emotion, and the attacks of rhythmical chorea” (193), he also suggested that her attacks could, like Flor—’s, be triggered at will. They were “easily produced either by pulling on the arm, or percussing the patella tendon” (ibid.). Charcot proceeded to offer a demonstration worth quoting at some length.

Now look at this patient. It will not be necessary for us to intervene, for the emotion that she has experienced at finding herself before so many people in the lecture room will save us the trouble of provoking an attack. In the first phase, rhythmical jerkings of the right arm, like the movements of hammering, occur. The patient has her eyes closed. Then after this period there succeeds a period of tonic spasms, and of contortions of the arm and head, recalling partial epilepsy. Here probably is a remnant of the convulsive hysterical attack. Finally, measured movements of the head to the right and the left occur; rapid movements defying all interpretation, for I ask you, what do they correspond to in the region of physiological acts? At the same time the patient utters a cry, or rather a kind of plaintive wail, all the same. And here again we find that character of co-ordination, that apparent adaptation, which belongs as a peculiar feature to rhythmical chorea. The attack ceases spontaneously. During all the time the patient has not lost consciousness for a single instant. (193-195)

Deb— underwent a full epileptiform seizure onstage, in front of the audience, apparently triggered by the emotion that this situation provoked. Charcot meanwhile offered a running narrative throughout, speaking over her fit, providing a real-time commentary worthy of any sports broadcaster. He also offered a dramatic structure and narrative arc in his description, going from the opening moment (“Now look at this patient”) to the succeeding rhythmical jerking, tonic spasms, and contortions, to the much more confusing rapid movements whose source was unknown to him, to her cry or wail, and a final moment, when “the attack ceases spontaneously” (195).

If the terror of finding herself on the Salpêtrière stage before an auditorium of doctors and others of note was sufficient to provoke a fit such as the one Charcot describes, the event must have been extremely stressful for Deb—. Indeed, it seems highly unlikely that she was indulging in a theatrical impulse or a desire to please her doctor alone; rather, it seems plausible that these were movements triggered with a pinch, a prod, or a word, and yet autonomic as well, performed by patients in Charcot’s clinic with dramatic consistency, offering all the allure of a repeat sideshow.6

6 Contemporary neurology would describe these as non-epileptic seizures (NESs), or pseudo-seizures,

164

Kélina Gotman

Figure 1: Marcalo chatting with an audience member during her epic Involuntary Dances. Photograph by Andy Wood.

Figure 2: Invited artists perform as Marcalo’s live image is projected on one wall. Photograph by Andy Wood.

165


And these patients were, as Gordon (2001) argues, models for the new avant-garde. From Charcot’s clinic to the epileptic singers of the 1890s, “fitting” bodies quickly became a regular feature of low and high art in the fin de siècle. As Gordon notes, “the artistic representation and popular spectacle of the body as a collection of nervous tics, dislocations, and mechanical reflexes, with the accompanying implications of medical pathology, began in the cabaret” (524). But such performances were legitimated and explored in the halls of the Salpêtrière, a strange performative space existing between scientific investigation and crafted theatricality. This was a space in which Charcot was doctor and master craftsman, wielding his magisterial authority. And the 1890s cabaret performers pilfered what they saw there to bring it to the popular stage, finding entertainment value in the eccentricity and spectacle of the gestures as well as in their apparent novelty. But the epileptics, hysteroepileptics, and choreics at the Salpêtrière were without an audience they could entirely call their own, one to whom they could tell their version of the story.

MArCALO’S INvOLuNTAry dANCES: gIFTS, FrAMES, ANd ThE TABOOWhen Portuguese-born, UK-based dancer and choreographer Rita Marcalo staged her twenty-four-hour performance at the Bradford Playhouse, she caused uproar among medical professionals, persons suffering from epilepsy, and members of the general public alike. Involuntary Dances, which was part of an internationally funded collaborative research project she initiated under the auspices of her Leeds-based dance company Instant Dissidence, followed upon an idea she had been tossing around, in jest, among friends for many years: as an epileptic, Marcalo had what she describes as her own “involuntary dances” (2010). For this project, she sought to explore these dances further, and secured support from the INTERACT initiative of the British Arts Council, Yorkshire Dance, Essexdance, and York Saint John University which offered her research leave. Involuntary Dances, initially conducted over two years, involved a period of studio work and a residency with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, where Marcalo sought to gain insight into the world of anti-convulsive medication. The culmination of the first part of the project was the twenty-four-hour performance, during which she abstained from her medication and engaged in a range of epileptogenic (seizure-inducing) activities, every hour on the hour. These were interspersed with ad hoc performances by live and video artists, drag queens, and musicians whom Marcalo had invited to perform alongside her over the course of the event. Electronic music spun throughout by a DJ ensured that people could hang out in the open bar area, dance, drink, and have a good time while she danced and chatted with them, keeping herself awake, and waiting—by the end quite desperately—for a seizure to come.

if their exact etiology is unknown, and attempts at treatment are problematic. For a discussion of retrospective diagnosis and pseudo-epilepsy, see Gotman (2008).

166

Kélina Gotman

As she described it, the event was a quarter art showcase, a quarter pyjama party, a quarter club night, and a quarter voyeuristic pleasure (Instant Dissidence 2012). By the morning, the initial audience of about forty had lessened by half, but many had stayed through the night in sleeping bags, while others went home and returned. The hired medics and ambulance personnel went home, softened by this strangest of assignments and, as Marcalo notes, having enjoyed the dancing and live art projects with the rest. Overall it was a convivial, warm, if also tiring party, and a marathon stint in the theatre space. But, overnight, a plethora of media stories emerged, complaining bitterly of the waste of public funds, the danger Marcalo imposed on herself, the gratuitousness and tastelessness of the act, and its uselessness for raising awareness about epilepsy. In an email forwarded to me by a colleague to inform me about the show, one postdoctoral research student was furious: “Though I basically agree with the motto ‘It’s just a fit. Get over it,’ I’m baffled by their claiming to have a right to choose what to do with their bodies, to the point of voluntarily inducing their fits for an audience to film them. I mean, then, what’s the point of our attempts to improve treatment adherence?!” (pers. comm.). Other commentators from Epilepsy Action and the National Society for Epilepsy noted that the performance should carry a health warning “advising people that they should not attempt this themselves” (Philip Lee in Sutherland 2009a) and that although the performance “gets people talking about epilepsy, […] it’s being presented as a freaky type of entertainment” and not “teaching people about seizures” (Sallie Baxendale in Norfolk 2009).7

The Guardian critic Allan Sutherland, who is also epileptic, defended Marcalo in a forum on the website Disability Arts Online. He noted that her work was raising important questions: “Why should not following the doctor’s orders be such a transgressive act? […] ‘Epileptic eats chocolate’ is hardly a front page story. Why should we not make our own decisions on such things?” It was also “curious” to him “what a strong reaction the news of this performance […] provoked in some other people with epilepsy.[…] I guess it’s to do with the fact that […] we tend to be very isolated,” he argued, “and therefore don’t get the chance to share experiences very much. So when a public event such as this occurs, a whole flood of emotion comes welling up to the surface” (Sutherland 2009b). Sutherland was responding to an onslaught of comments posted in response to a review of Marcalo’s work on the same website: one contributor complained that her performance was “a horrendous act of exhibitionism, and anyone who went to watch it should be

7 Elsewhere, Baxendale suggested that Marcalo’s “failure to have a seizure on cue” can also “teach us more about the condition than a public seizure ever could” (Baxendale 2009); but this teaching remains very much in the realm of epilepsy research, whereas Marcalo was putting forward a personal experience and a relationship to friends and strangers: this was not about teaching or learning as much as it was about experiencing (as it turned out) a quite powerful coming out. The lessons learned were about taboos and, unfortunately, as the experience showed, an indication of their powerful hold on the public imagination across sectors.

167


Figure 3: Audience members with sleeping bags catch a moment of sleep. Photograph by Andy Wood.

Figure 4: It’s also a party. Photograph by Andy Wood.

168

Kélina Gotman

ashamed of themselves for whatever it was they were hoping to see,” arguing, “Rita has won awards for her dance,” but “I just wonder whether she is in fact that good at it if she has had to resort to exploiting her medical condition to get herself noticed” (Watson 2009).

Rita Marcalo is a dancer and choreographer. For Involuntary Dances she sought to out her epilepsy and put it centre stage, literally situating it within a framed section of an open performance space. While she normally fled from public view when she sensed the onset of a seizure, she decided to confront it here in public. She had long been fascinated by the involuntary movements her epilepsy occasioned, movements that contrasted with the carefully trained and exact motion she was accustomed to performing as a dancer. And as she notes, she had never seen herself fit and wanted to know what she looked like while inviting others to do so with her. So she decided, in the context of this project, to trigger the seizure among friends and audience members—or at least to try. She would film the process, and have a record of her seizure to view and to use in the next leg of the project. The fact that she failed to have a seizure was, as one respondent on Disability Arts Online noted, beside the point. In conversation, she confirmed this: although frustrated by the failure (doctors later suggested that an adrenaline high from performing might have kept the seizure at bay, although draconian risk assessment measures imposed as part of the project may have done so as well), she ultimately felt transformed in the process, as if this had been a real coming out (Marcalo 2010).

Indeed Marcalo’s work highlighted deeply held taboos around disability and epilepsy, voluntary and involuntary motion, control and authorship, and the charged space of the stage as frame. She did this in a performance context to pose questions she hoped would make people think (in Brown 2009). As she notes (Marcalo 2010), she was particularly interested in the audience’s role as witness, somewhere between co-conspirator and voyeur. It was the act of viewing and its legitimation that interested her: “I am inviting the audience to be voyeuristic of me,” she noted in an interview with The Independent (ibid.). In the Telegraph, she argued:

If you Google or YouTube “epileptic seizures,” you come up with all kinds of mobile phone footage which has been filmed without the patients’ consent. Part of me doing this is to address the voyeurism. I am saying, I am choosing to let you do this. (Marcalo in Stokes 2009)

For Marcalo, the performance was an effort to think through the notion of the “bad” patient who takes control of his or her personal and public space, even against the doctor’s orders. Many epileptics choose to live without medication (which has its own cast of intrusive side effects) and control their epilepsy through diet, sleep, or other means. As a child and a teenager, Marcalo often neglected to take her medication, and drank or smoked; as a consequence she suffered more frequent seizures. She eventually tempered this by reducing her caffeine and alcohol

169


intake, but still sought through her performance work to draw attention to the problem of personal choice and agency (Marcalo 2010). People with disabilities, she argues, are typically treated as if decisions are not theirs to make, and must, if they are to be good patients, do as they are told. The paternalism and infantilisation implied in this attitude—for all its intended good will—haunted the event and its discursive aftermath.

But, more than anything, Marcalo wanted to invite friends and strangers to participate in this part of her life with her, and to do so in a controlled setting. Since seizures come unbidden, this was an opportunity to bid one welcome for once, and in good company. As she suggests, she had originally thought she would present this performance in a more low-key setting, with family and friends. That she chose to work within a public venue, opening the doors to an unanticipated flood of criticism, suggests the work touched a nerve exposing public squeamishness against epilepsy, as well as dramatising the public sanctification of the medical profession. If she had been undergoing a seizure in front of an auditorium of medical students in a lecture hall, as in Charcot’s model, she would have had her seizures triggered for her, most likely through direct stimulation to the brain, with a crowd of doctors and researchers watching. She would have been clothed in a hospital robe, and made anonymous or partially so. She would also have been unconscious, effectively absent throughout. In this sense, the surprise that her performance caused among medical researchers was perhaps simply that they see this all the time—it is banal to them: it is not theatre, it is work. And epilepsy is a condition to be eradicated and controlled, not observed for its aesthetic or performative qualities, or for fun, out of curiosity or to pass the time. Perhaps most importantly, it was not for a patient to decide when to make (or try to make) a seizure happen. It was not so much that it could be dangerous to Marcalo or to others (seizures are rarely so, particularly in controlled settings); but rather, that she was refusing to treat this with the secrecy and shame of a disorder, instead living her epilepsy as a performative aspect of her everyday—and now her public-life.

By framing herself and her body as in-between a controlled, predictable entity and an unruly, changing, polymorphic and frightening object of attention and display, Marcalo inserted her experiment into a long line of performance art works that question the borders between vernacular and spectacular selves. Carrie Sandahl (1999) has described feeling doubled and disoriented, as well as spectacularised (and metaphorised) when she posed nude for a medical textbook (11-12). When Orlan performed her work Omnipresence (1993), a seven-hour surgical operation in which she had small horns grafted into the sides of her head, she called it “carnal art,” a form of “self-portraiture, in the classical sense” (1990). Her series of surgical operations from 1979 through the 1990s continued a body of work in which she staged herself as a morphing human object. In Marina Abramovic ’s 1974

170

Kélina Gotman

performance Rhythm 2, the artist offered the inverse of Marcalo’s Involuntary Dances by ingesting psychotropic drugs to see what the effect would be. Her ingestion of a pill prescribed for catatonia provoked a violent seizure which audiences were invited to watch. Paul Sharits’s 1976 experimental film Epileptic Seizure Comparison was an exploration of the non-reciprocal act of viewing, highlighting—through the obscure flicker of a close-up of the head and eyelids of an epileptic undergoing a seizure—an unsettling expansion and contraction of time, apprehensive waiting and the non-event. The irregular flitting of the image provokes a sense of semi-consciousness; but the mystique or uncertainty as to what is happening, as well as the strange sense that an invisible veil or barrier is clouding the event, also separates the seizure—and the patient—from the viewer in this film. In all these cases the subject’s agency and their status as a body and object are dramatised. These activities were set in rhetorical quotation marks, on a stage or in a frame, a gallery or theatrical setting, drawing attention to the performances’ status as events; events that are always provoking potentially fraught and ethically charged relationships between viewers and viewed.

For her event, Marcalo placed herself in a two-metre-square cage within the combined bar and performance area: a simple if acutely violent and powerful choice of mise en scène. Marcalo has often stated that she feels most comfortable (and safe) in enclosed spaces, to which she retreats when sensing the onset of a seizure (for the sake of privacy and to spare onlookers’ distress). The cage also enabled video cameras to be fixed to every corner, capturing the event in one-second shots, so that when she had a seizure, it would occur within this camera-ready frame. But as a theatrical device, the cage also resonated with various performance histories: dance in sixties club culture, and the infamous go-go girl in a cage; and a longer and more sinister history of freak shows and exhibitions staged in nineteenth-century fairs, in which midgets, dwarfs, “Indians,” and bearded women were displayed, along with people suffering from a wide range of medical conditions. That the trope of the nineteenth-century freak show has become canonical in contemporary performance studies in the wake of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s The Couple in the Cage (1993) only further reinforces Marcalo’s quotation of the cage as an image that evokes the legacy of paternalism and the white man’s burden to protect, to educate, and to better those who come to be made dependent upon him. But whereas Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s performance was turned back onto the audience (framed in photographs pointing and waving at these two “found” Amerindians, apparently naive to the ethics of the cage as a space of display), Marcalo offered a performance that deflected the viewer’s gaze back onto the promised event and its anticipation. She positioned herself as a freak (and club dancer), but—as it turned out—the waiting delayed gratification, allowing audience members to get past their expectant images of the freakish or the monstrous, the sexualised or the deviant, to see her as a woman doing her thing, perhaps suffering from a (rather banal) medical condition and, for the time being, having a regular night out with everyone else. The

171


mixture of fascination in the exhibition and spectacle, and the guilt associated with such fascination, were finally undone—perhaps demystified—as Marcalo invited her audiences simply to hang out with her, waiting for the spectral fit.

All the players in the Involuntary Dances—audience and participants—were gathered to await Marcalo’s seizure, undergoing increasingly anxious anticipation, moments of boredom, and distraction. Twenty-four hours is a long time to spend in an art venue, dancing or huddled in a sleeping bag, expecting to be awoken at any moment by a siren. No matter how many gallery-based marathon works (or rave parties) may have hardened audiences to the idea, the process created a sense of community, both through the game of watching Marcalo and waiting with her. Ironically, there was nothing much to see and nothing much to experience but the act of waiting, and of course confronting one’s own imagination and anticipation of the seizure—the spectre of the event. That was arguably, in the end, the point of the performance. Although Marcalo genuinely sought to stage an epileptic fit (which would be, similarly, both spectacular and banal), this was, finally, an event designed less to show the fit than to show the showing of (or, in this case, waiting for) the fit. In doing so, the artist questioned what others might be willing to see or accept of her, not just as a professionally trained dancer or a performer, but as a person with epilepsy, making this part of her private life public—and calling it art, like so many other mundane acts of the last fifty years and like so many that tread the in-between space joining performance and the everyday.

As I am arguing, Involuntary Dances treads fraught ground between the visible and the invisible, the seen and the unseen, the showing and the taking away.8 Yet, the polarisation of visibility and invisibility is troubled and morphed in Marcalo’s case, as the spectre of a sudden act between appearance (the fit) and disappearance (the epileptic’s conscious self) threatens to annihilate the epileptic person to herself just as she becomes spectacular to the viewer. She has not so much obliterated (or shown) herself in the process, as performed an act between disappearance and display—and, as Marcalo suggests, that is okay. That is, this transition, this in-between, is normalised as well as fêted, and it is shared: Marcalo resists mere display, asking her spectators to stand in for (and with) her—to become her eyes, her witnesses, and her designated, conscious, seeing selves as she fades from her own view. When she returns to consciousness she will keep dancing and have another drink, aware only that she will have been seen, openly, of her own choice and according to parameters that she established (ironically, still, with the paternalistic oversight of the medical

8 Ann Cooper Albright has argued that, for the disabled dancer, the stage is a radical space in which the disabled body, normally hidden or obliterated from view, collides with the visual availability assumed by the performer, a body “displayed in ways that accentuate the double role of technical prowess and sexual desirability” (2001, 57). Disability studies often poses disabled performance as recouping visibility, claiming visual space back, by saying: I am here; I am visible.

172

Kélina Gotman

Figure 5: Rita Marcalo in her cage, dancing. Photograph by Lucy Barker.

Figure 6: Marcalo with coffee and list of seizure-inducing actions.

Photograph by Lucy Barker.

establishment behind the scenes, which closely monitored and approved her plans for running of the event, before any outcry took place).

Other artists have created performance work that treads the space between private and public, entertainment and fear, the daily and the extra-daily, ethics and aesthetics. Tracey Emin exposes her underwear, bed, and letters to boyfriends to public scrutiny; Andrea Fraser performs sex in a hotel room with a patron on film, in a deliberately static, unappealing light; Sam Taylor-Wood photographs friends drunk, at parties. This self-reflexive mode places the artist’s dirty laundry in the public view in an attempt to provoke questions about ownership and the limits of social taboos, as well as to play with the line between the artist and the art, the giver and the gift, the audience and the consumer, in a staunchly relational world that compels reflection on what is too private to be on display. This strategy of performance art works in a zone between the invitation to participate (as bystander or voyeur) in the act of exposure that frames acts as everyday on the one hand, and the injunction to be complicit in making them extra-daily on the other. What Nicholas Bourriaud has called a “relational aesthetic” (18ff) foregrounds the moment of exchange and

173


contract, as well as the idea of reciprocity, performed through viewership (and often a politics of institutional backing). Whether these transposed, translated, reframed or exchanged objects and events are aesthetically convincing is beside the point. Revealing an aspect of the self is a choice foregrounded as a strange sort of gift the artist makes to the public. But as neutral or as innocent as the gift may purport to be (this is “just” my underwear, my friends, my self), as with any gift it can have mixed implications for the receiver, who may suddenly feel indebted, uncomfortable, or burdened by the gift in spite of the implicit contract they entered into by attending the event or by viewing the work at which it was offered. There is a contractual obligation to receive the gift by simply being present or being witness to these barely choreographed lives (whether or not viewers knew what they were in for).

Curiously, when too much is given, the gifting itself becomes an event: “I am here,” offered as a casual invitation to peer into another’s life becomes an intransigent “you (the artist) are there and I (the viewer) am here”; and with that comes an ethical and social injunction to take stock of the encounter. The discomfort that this provokes, even if the encounter is learned of in potentia (we don’t need to see Marcalo’s seizure to become interested in the fact that she should try to trigger one and invite others to see this), suggests that much more is at stake than just the exposure of one aspect of the self. In this case, the whole medical apparatus is exposed. If Marcalo is choosing to let herself fit, worldwide multi-million dollar attempts to find a cure for epilepsy are (ostensibly) put into question. This is a serious affair, not something to play with or take lightly. This epilepsy, the argument goes, is, of all things, something for her to keep to herself. It’s not to be given but taken away. The limits of what can be offered stop there.

Marcalo’s move was a powerful one. Indeed, she positioned herself as the author of this work, creating the conditions to enable an epileptic seizure in “nature” and the neurologist’s stead. This offered the inverse of the gifting relationship: Marcalo was taking away, erasing the mark of anti-epileptic drugs and scientific control to reclaim a body temporarily untouched by medical progress or the stamp of medical normalcy. But she was also toying with a weird and ambivalent concept of nature: nature ostensibly makes the seizure happen but it was also against nature here for her to try to trigger a seizure that should come of its own accord, without being provoked. Although in some parts of the world a seizure signals a shamanistic calling (Eliade 1964, 15ff), Marcalo was acting in a context in which the epileptic seizure is a noxious part of a disease complex, not a privileged part of the natural (and spiritual) order. Its public presence (and bidding) was not welcome, as epilepsy, in this society, is something to be overcome. That is not to say that Marcalo is against medication or cures, only that she was interested to experience her epilepsy, for once, in a relatively safe and open setting, as much as possible on her own terms. And what she had often described as a feeling of “absent presence” (2010) in the wake

174

Kélina Gotman

of a seizure, that typically made her feel at once vulnerable, public and spectacular to anyone who was a witness, made her epilepsy feel like it was already theatre.

In the second part of her trilogy of works exploring dance, epilepsy, and drug research, Marcalo created a piece called She’s Lost Control (2010), in which she offers audiences a deliberately uncanny, claustrophobic space in which to enact their voyeurism. In this work Marcalo projects a video of an epileptic seizure (not her own, since she was unable to capture one on film in the first portion of the project). It is barely visible, the clear viewing being frustrated by holes poked into the walls on which the film was projected and by a cascade of dust that served as a temporary, quickly vanishing screen. She is clear about her relationship to the problem of spectacle in this work: just as we cannot help but look at a car crash while knowing we should turn away, so too watching someone else’s seizure enacts this fascination and guilt. Yet, the aesthetic question of the seizure as movement, and as a sort of involuntary dance, looms in this work. At once framed by the installation and the viewer’s gaze, it unsettles on account of its rigid gestures, flickering eyelids, and unaesthetic postures. It operates beyond the body’s control, while the event exhibits both a sense of regaining control (of the situation) and enacting a carefully framed loss of control. It is that limit—between control (or loss thereof) and its framing—that Marcalo and other contemporary artists working with and through neurological and movement disorders seek to enact.

INvOLuNTAry MOvEMENT, CONTrOL, BEAuTy, ANd ThE ALTErkINETIC TurNMarcalo set herself on display in a series of works that question agency and audience while posing questions about medical research, normalcy and the gaze (medical or otherwise). Hers was a work of live art, offering an uncertain outcome to those interested in the task and questions she put forth at the start. The similarity to works I discuss next stops there, but in all these pieces the aesthetics of the voluntary and the involuntary are paramount, and as such go to the heart of what we think of as performance and dance, framing and articulating motion to reflect a particular relationship between art and nature (and crafted or “natural” form).

In Wayne McGregor’s AtaXia, premiered at Sadler’s Wells in 2004 and performed by McGregor’s company Random Dance, Sarah Seddon Jenner, a woman suffering from ataxia (a movement disorder that inhibits muscular coordination) performed alongside the other dancers. This was staged in the context of a collaborative research project with Scott deLahunta at Dartington College, and researchers in experimental psychology, computing, cognition and brain science across the United Kingdom and France. In contrast to Random Dance’s normally ultra-sleek movement vocabulary, McGregor sought in this project “to make a piece about disorder, about being uncoordinated” (in Hale 2004). His initial questions were:

175


“How can you make a highly skilled body be genuinely uncoordinated?” and “How could we set up interventions or confusions that would prevent the dancers from being able to exercise the facilities they’re trained in?” (ibid.).9

The carefully crafted performance of uncoordination presented by McGregor’s dancers offered moments of disorientation and kinetic loss such as those experienced by sufferers of ataxia or other neuromotor disorders. These movements were informed by the dancers’ experimentation with control and loss of control in a laboratory setting and integrated into the choreography throughout. In performance, the contrast between stereotypically controlled and non-controlled moments was jarring, breathtaking in its precision, and troubling for the muscular dispossession the gestures represented. But, except for Jenner, this was a representation. The movements were both real and fabricated: acts of gestural mimesis evoking a dyskinetic world. As such, this piece staged the drama of ballet: bodies inhabiting classical technique, coordination, and control, crafted to be rhetorically set free. If the conflict was never quite reconciled, inasmuch as the piece suggested (often without enacting) a controlled disorder, it also opened up an aesthetic approach to ataxic and dyskinetic gestures through classically trained and shaped bodies.

In Alain Platel and the Ballets C de la B’s Out of Context: For Pina (2010), Platel staged another sort of relationship to involuntary movements, sourcing his work in the gestures of madness and hysteria, ecstasy and chorea. His dancers stripped to their underwear, twitched and jerked, at first to an uncomfortable degree, until some audience members left (on the night I attended, at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris). These were virtuosic dancers imitating movement disorders with a masterful ability to quote the wobbling and the arching, the tensing and the crisping of all the ataxias, choreas, and dyskinesias in the medical repertoire. As I experienced the show, the ethics were at first unclear: was this an enlightened approach to disability or an offensive appropriation? A nervous laugh rippled through the audience as the techno beats intensified to spur on the dancers now performing a wider range of dyskinetic techno and hip hop moves. They were popping and krumping, with microphones in their hands (and mouths), inexpertly singing fragments of pop songs. As the show progressed, the passage from choreic to club moves and back again increased in fluidity, and the slightly awkward feeling from the start that we were watching a sleek performance of disability dissolved into what felt like the world of sheer movement. This, for me was Platel’s stroke of genius. The poorly sung riffs (from “Aisha” to “Nothing Compares to You”) were familiar and funny, not least for the comic poverty of their execution, which highlighted the dancers’ vulnerable selves, selves not professionally trained in song. The hysteric, tense arches

9 On AtaXia and the Choreography and Cognition project, see http://www.choreog.net/. See also Kuppers (2007, 178-181).

176

Kélina Gotman

of the back, sharp movements of the head, and spastic twitches were folded back into the head-bopping and body-popping concoctions of the world of electronic music and late-night ecstasy parties to offer a superb, bizarrely remixed universe of order and disorder, normalcy and abnormalcy, party moves and neurodegenerative conditions. By the end of the night I didn’t know what was up or down, abled, disabled, or virtuosic. The beauty of the choreic gestures gained relief as they were juxtaposed against the more familiar movements of hip hop, trance, and other dance moves of the last twenty or thirty years.

Neither violent nor pacific, these were now in the most awesome sense simply bodies moving, and the whole world of neurology and medicine, movement disorders and hysteria, madness and disability seemed to dissolve. This is not to suggest that Platel sought to make moral or ethical judgments about medicine or disorders—the show was noticeably without didactic overtones—but the conflation and reconfiguration of normal and abnormal, beauty and the taboo, as well as voluntary and involuntary movements, presented a world in which the merely human was repositioned at the centre of the world, aesthetically framed by the stage.

The comic aspects of uncoordination described by Bergson (1900) in his essay on laughter are germane to this work: awkward bodies on stage, bodies being bodies (falling, farting, needing to sit down, showing signs of fatigue) are at the opposite

Figure 7: Ballets C de la B dancers in Out of Context: For Pina. Directed by Alain Platel. Photograph by Chris Van der Burght.

177


end of the theatrical spectrum from the tragic character who is all thought and action and no body (9ff). Dancers trained in the classical tradition transcend the messy bodiedness of the comic realm and show signs of failure or vulnerability theatrically only through swooping gestures or other rhetorical tropes indicating, without instantiating, fragility. The whole cannon of classical dance (and the modern and contemporary traditions that build on, while rejecting it) revolve around this aesthetic of transcendence. And yet, corporeal failures and awkward bits of costume or appendages can also seem ethereal and classically beautiful, as well as offsetting and enabling a wider range of gestures.

In bODY_rEMIX / gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS (2010), Québec choreographer Marie Chouinard presents balletic movements hindered (but more often enhanced) by prostheses, crutches, bandages, braces, and other medical implements evoking hospital wards and broken body parts, as well as severe neurological conditions. Again, the paradox is patent: perfectly trained dancers stretched and skipped, slinked and pirouetted across the stage with toe shoes on their hands and crutches strapped to their chests, reshaping pictures of normalised beauty in a theatre of preternaturally agile form. Although the dancers were well positioned to execute all the choreography offered to them by Chouinard with a standard virtuosity, the dramatisation of these body parts and implements offer a reconfiguration of beautiful balletic form. Arguably, the often demonised classical balletic standard to which these objects were appended might have dissolved long ago; and yet, more than serving as a statement on ballet or hospital wards (though dance brings with it a whole array of injuries and broken limbs), the piece eschewed judgment or moralising while coolly evoking both. The contrast between the thin, sculpted dancing bodies, the ballet bars, and these medical prostheses insisted on disbanding the contrast between dance and disorder, possibly to go beyond classical perfection or cure.

When I saw this piece at Sadler’s Wells a few months after Platel’s Out of Context, I could not help but note the resonance between the two pieces, as if this signalled a trend or new paradigm in contemporary dance-theatre, following less in the footsteps of Robert Wilson who put “non-actors” like Christopher Knowles (who suffered a medical disorder inasmuch as he was autistic) onstage, and more in the tradition of the late medieval Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, for whom the whole symphonic range of human gestures offered equal scope for artistic representation. This was a far cry from Marcalo’s experimentation, in which the drama of the real contrasted with, and was offset by, the stage space as frame. But both Chouinard and Platel offered similar attention to the expanded realm of gesture and the aesthetico-emotional palette presenting vulnerability, fragility, and monstrosity in one theatrical breath. These were offered to the viewer in a complex

178

Kélina Gotman

play of light and shadow reflecting the viewer’s gaze onto an image of distortion, which gradually appeared no longer distorted at all.

It would be too easy to chastise Chouinard and Platel for failing to offer what companies like Amici and others do so brilliantly: open the stage up to differently-abled performers.10 That would be to miss the point of these works, which are doing something else. Where companies working with differently abled performers may seek to shift public conceptions of skill and broaden the emotional (and motional) spectrum of onstage life, as well as the worldviews of the theatre— and dance—going public, McGregor, Platel, and Chouinard do so primarily from within classical and contemporary dance languages that emphasise form, rhythm, motion, and control in particular ways. As such, they seek to expand the gestural vocabularies that stretch the edges of comparatively more institutionalised and even sacrosanct dance canons (among the establishment and classical avant-gardes). This turn may herald a shift away from the last new dance paradigm which has refused the grandiloquence of highly-skilled movement and the tyranny of technique in favour of stillness, and the narrative arc in favour of the post-dramatic and conceptual: whether from

10 Since 1980, Amici Dance Theatre Company has been among several companies who pioneer work “integrating able-bodied and disabled artists and performers.” See http://www.amicidance.org/about.html/. See also Candoco Dance Company, at http://www.candoco.co.uk/.

Figure 8: Dancers Carol Prieur and Chi Long in bODY_rEMIX / gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS. Choreography and photograph by Marie Chouinard.

179


within or without the world of “abled” and “less-abled” performers, the parameters of what constitutes beauty and technique are upturned. Indeed, what I am calling the alterkinetic turn emphasises movement and all its discontents: abled, disabled, virtuosic, technically proficient, amateurish, and expansive. It seeks to operate at the limits of movement and so to refigure, while ostensibly disfiguring, human bodies in motion. More than seeking to highlight discursive genealogies, it explores the density and intensity of locomotion. These are movements—dyskinetic or, in their performative, aesthetic configuration, alterkinetic ones—typically shielded from public view. By recuperating segregated worlds of motion and gesture, the choreic, the epileptic, the ataxic, and the myoclonic (if often vaguely), these choreographic gestures perform an act of reparation that is at once politically and ethically charged, as well as potently aesthetic.

This may herald a new formalism. It takes from the expanded world of everyday movement vocabularies to re-present how it is that we move, dance, shake, stumble, and fall vulnerably but perhaps with a sort of grace. This paradox—such an ancient one and such a taboo in the contemporary art world of anti-aesthetics and (in dance) the anti-balletic prejudice—reconfigures grace in the old etymological sense of good will, praise, and pleasure. It signals an opening out into forms or modes of movement that have been hidden, excluded, or excised. The welcoming embrace into a twelve-tone cacophony of movements offers an alterkinetic twist on the politico-aesthetic dyads pitting beauty against the anti-aesthetic, technique and virtuosity against the mundane or the amateur, structure against incoherence, control against loss of control, and, significantly, voluntary against involuntary. It opens up a broader conversation on involuntary movements and movement “disorders,” as well as a return to (and a reconfiguration of) technique as craft and as language. The choreographers examined here revisit the classical vocabulary and techniques of the modern repertoire, and appropriate the ethics and aesthetics of the everyday in a charged hypermotor (and hyperkinetic) offering.

The exhausted anti-dance paradigm of the last twenty years—characterised by the work of Jérôme Bel, Xavier LeRoy, and others, for whom dance was vanishing into the idea, a disappearing present, as Lepecki has noted, perpetually without a past (2006, 124)—has stood alongside artists continuing to work within a staunchly kinetic and hyperkinetic vocabulary or tradition. The legacy of the Judson Dance opened up the possibility of walking, sitting, and standing minimally, and with attention (and intention), to get to the core of something called dance by stripping away all that was heralded as classical repetition of past tradition. But it also stripped away the virtuosity and supposed tyranny of technique exemplified in the classical ballet canon, seen to have been perpetuating a legacy of mythically aristocratic models at odds with the democratising impulse of the 1960s. Yet, what I am calling the alterkinetic turn (or mode) points towards another approach to dance that does

180

Kélina Gotman

not inhibit, restrict, or undo movement; that is not ineluctably still or invested in melancholic gestures eternally going into disappearance or toward infinite points of no return. Rather, it moves fast (and slow), across various horizons, pilfering gestures and movements from the medical or clubbing repertoire, from order and disorder, high art and the everyday, to reclaim normal and abnormal, eccentric and classical at once. It moves spasmodically, teetering at the edge of non-control, with messiness and with precision. It is expansive, defining a new (and old) sort of aesthetics that adds rather than subtracts, and finds new forms of virtuosity within the old.

While posing questions about normalcy, marginality, and the virtuosic, these alterkinetic worlds are also offering a radical return on one of the final taboos in contemporary performance: the realm of the aesthetic. Following Jacques Rancière’s meditations on politics and aesthetics in Le partage du sensible [Politics and Aesthetics] (2000), politics and the community came back with force to haunt the theatrical (and the theoretical) stage, informing debates on audiences and participation. But the problem of beauty and form in that decade was almost an embarrassment. It was almost too political, too fraught with the spectre of media-driven beauty standards and a politics of exclusion. Yet what has struck me across all the works I have described here is the extent to which they pose the question of beauty and form as political and ethical questions. They take symmetry, and undo it. They take fluidity and complicate it. But there is no rejection of these in favour of an anti-aesthetic or systematic undoing of “trained” movement, movement emphasising solipsism, silence, or stumbling above straight lines or perfectly executed pirouettes.

According to this view, there is and never was anything to be ashamed of in dancing well, or mastering a craft; it does not all have to be failure, inhibition, or impotence. Rather, in what I see as a new, emerging alterkinetic aesthetic, the whole range of movement vocabularies and intensities is fair play, from the fast-paced and the balletic to the still, the choreic, or the haphazard. It is as if dance and dance-theatre had turned back on themselves to re-embrace variegated gestural vocabularies onstage, and I do not think we are the worse for it.

CONCLuSIONS: ALTErkINETICS AFTEr FOuCAuLTWhat I have called the alterkinetic turn draws from the movement vocabularies of medicine and the life sciences, club culture and cultures of display (museums, freak shows) to reclaim the broadest possible spectrum of movement for dance and dance-theatre. The shift, from a performance of alterity in the freak shows and medical demonstrations of Charcot’s clinic, to a bold claim for the legitimacy and flexibility of movement worlds on stage, offers a performative landscape that is at once heterogeneous and polykinetic. Rather than focusing on the figure of the amateur, the aesthetics of not-dance, or a sort of existential aporia that bars

181


the performer from engaging in a lost Atlantis of balletic worlds past, what I am suggesting is that the alterkinetic turn reconfigures movement, theatre, and dance in an expanded field. It shifts the choreographic project away from a rhetorical undoing of classical technique and its supposed elitism towards a diverse, polymorphic, heteroglossic language of movement borrowing as much from neurology and medical science, ballet and hip hop, as the cognitive or choreographic lab.

This may suggest a post-Foucauldian landscape in which the “abnormal” walk out of doors, and out from behind societally or self-imposed walls, to upturn movement and its disorders, refusing the self-segregation of identity politics as well as embarrassment or enclosure. Whether this idealism or expansiveness will call for a pendulum swing back towards restricted motion, exhausted minimalisms, and refusal to dance is another issue; for now, I am glad to see movement onstage. I am also glad if this movement—in all its forms—reconfigures our most cherished beliefs about beauty, normalcy, and locomotion.

WOrkS CITEdAlbright, Ann Cooper. 2001. “Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance,” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright, 56-66. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Aubert, Geneviève Aubert. 2005. “Charcot Revisited: The Case of Bruegel’s Chorea.” Archives of Neurology 62: 155-161.

Baxendale, Sallie. 2009. “Dangerous Myths about Epilepsy.” BBC News Viewpoint. December 16, 2009. Accessed 11 May 2011. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8413404.stm/.

BBC News. 2009. “Artist to Induce Seizure on Stage.” November 19. Accessed 15 March 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/8368159.stm/.

Bergson, Henri. 1900. Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique. Paris: Félix Alcan, éditeur.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du réel.

Brown, Jonathan. 2009. “Artist to Have an Epileptic Fit Live on Stage.” The Independent, November 20.

Charcot, Jean-Martin. 1991. Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System. Edited by Ruth Harris. Translated by Thomas Savill. London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge.

182

Kélina Gotman

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

Eliade, Mircea. (1964) 1989. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by Willard R. Trask. London: Penguin Books.

Goetz, Christopher G. 1991. “Visual Art in the Neurologic Career of Jean-Martin Charcot.” Archives of Neurology 48: 421-425.

Gordon, Rae Beth. 2001. “From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema.” Critical Inquiry 27 (3): 515-549.

———. 2003. “Natural Rhythm: La Parisienne Dances with Darwin: 1875-1910.” Modernism/Modernity 10 (4): 617-656.

Gotman, Kélina. 2007. “Hysteria Never Looked So Good: Witness Relocation’s Dancing vs. the Rat Experiment and New Stage Theatre Company’s Some Historic/Some Hysteric.” PAJ 86: 66-73.

———. 2008. “Choreomania.” Unpublished PhD diss., Columbia University.

Hale, Catherine. 2004. “The Science of Making Dances.” Dance Gazette 2: 16-19. Accessed 3 November 2010. http://www.choreocog.net/papers.html/.

Instant Dissidence. 2012. Accessed 15 February 2012. http://www.instantdissidence.co.uk/.

Justice-Malloy, Rhona. 1995. “Charcot and the Theatre of Hysteria.” The Journal of Popular Culture 28 (4): 133-138.

Kuppers, Petra. 2007. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcalo, Rita. 2010. Personal interview with the author. Bradford, UK. November 2.

Marshall, Jonathan. 2002. “Performing Hysteria: Charcot and the Problem of Theatrical Representation.” Proceedings of the Western Society of French History 28: 19-26.

———. 2003. “Nervous Dramaturgy: Pain, Performance and Excess in the Work of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, 1862-1893.” Double Dialogues 4 [n.p.].

183


———. 2007. “Dynamic Medicine and Theatrical Form at the Fin de Siècle: A Formal Analysis of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s Pedagogy, 1862-1893.” Modernism/Modernity 15 (1): 131-153.

McCarren, Felicia. 1998. Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Norfolk, Andrew. 2009. “Dancer Rita Marcalo to Have Epileptic Fit on Stage.” The Times, November 20.

Orlan. 1990. “Manifesto of Carnal Art.” Accessed 9 February 2012. http://www.orlan.net/texts/.

Rancière, Jacques. 2000. Le Partage du Sensible: Esthétique et Politique. Paris: La fabrique-éditions.

Sandahl, Carrie. 1999. “Ahhhh Freak Out! Metaphors of Disability and Femaleness in Performance.” Theatre Topics 9 (1): 11-30.

Schade, Sigrid. 1995. “Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body: The ‘Pathos Formula’ as an Aesthetic Staging of Psychiatric Discourse: A Blind Spot in the Reception of Warburg.” Art History 18 (4): 499-517.

Stokes, Paul. 2009. “Epileptic Actress Attempts to Induce Fit on Stage.” Telegraph, November 19.

Sutherland, Allan. 2009a. “Epilepsy as Live Art Isn’t Controversial.” The Guardian, November 20.

———. 2009b. “Disability Arts Online.” Accessed 2 February 2010 and 11 May 2011. http://www.disabilityartsonline.org/?location_id=1110/.

Watson, Cat. 2009. “Disability Arts Online.” December 13. Accessed 2 February 2010 and 11 May 2011. http://www.disabilityartsonline.org/?location_id=1110/.

Epilepsy, Chorea and Involuntary Movements Onstage: The Politics and Aesthetics of Alterkinetic...

Documents

Transcript of Epilepsy, Chorea and Involuntary Movements Onstage: The Politics and Aesthetics of Alterkinetic...