Mind the Gap, or: the Mind in the Gap
Difference and Repetition in Tom Plischke’s Solos
1. Movement in Time and Space
In a series of paradoxes reported by Aristotle amongst others, the sophist Zenon of Elea argues in favour of the impossibility of movement. In the paradox of the arrow he points out that no body can be in two spaces at the same time. If the body is in its place, it does not move. Since he cannot be in another space as the one he is in, it cannot move, which means that it does not move at all. A body that wants to move from A to B would have to reach the middle of that distance A1 first. In order to reach that middle it would have to reach the middle A2 between A and A1 first and so on for every part of the way still ahead. Here, too, the body cannot make any progress until in the end it has not left position A at all.(1) For Zenon, movement and space cannot be thought of together. It is obvious to us that he can only claim that the arrow does not move because he forgets to take a particular notion of time into consideration, a notion that makes time continuous with space. Time transforms each individual image into a continuum like a motion picture that turns its 24 individual images per second into the illusion of a continuous movement. Heraklit, on the other hand, was fully aware of the power of time when he claims that one cannot go into the same river twice. The lapse of time between incident one and two transforms both the river and myself.
Far from being a philosophical commonplace and a pragmatist truism, the notion of time together with its structural elements difference and repetition is intricately linked to what we call identity. We perceive ourselves as a unity with a stable centre precisely because we are able to link our past history to our present experience and our future potential. And yet, as the examples both of Zenon and of Heraklit inevitably show, each instance of repetition is dangerous for the subject as it may disrupt the very unity identity is based on. Repetition transports the same to another place and time. In the process of being dislocated, it undergoes the risk of becoming something else.
To go back to Zenon’s arrow, it becomes clear that each instant of repetition is marked by an instance of forgetting, of a „Stocken“, as the American philosopher Samuel Weber calls it in his reading of Sören Kirkegaard’s Die Wiederholung.(2) The „Stocken“, the stop or the gap between A and B, sees the subject hesitate and ultimately stand still thus disrupting the continuum of time and of history. What is being repeated refuses to become because it refuses to move. It refuses to become a whole in the organic sense of the term with a full grasp of its past that feeds into its present and future. It refuses to become a whole for the sake of a fixation on things past that, in Freudian terms, split the subject from itself into a conscious and unconscious part. The subject is bound to repeat the same actions over and over again precisely because he or she is not aware that he or she is engaged in the activity of repetition since the source of repetition, that conflictual incident in the subject’s past which refuses to go away, has been suppressed.(3) It therefore refuses to become history in the sense of a linear story while at the same time transporting and being history, albeit one that prevents the subject from being at one with itself.
In Heraklit’s example, I am only aware of time when I repeat which undermines the singularity of the very act that is being established by the act of repetition. I can only step into the same river once, yet I am only aware of this if I do it at least twice. In phenomenological terms, as Eckhard Lobsien has shown, the flow of time which since Edmund Husserl’s Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893-1917) is the very essence of our conscious being paradoxically links the singularity of an event with its repetition.(4) The reception of a work of art takes place in time which ceaselessly flows. Art communicates a heightened awareness of the here and now because it arranges its constitutive elements, its material in a unique way. These present moments, however, continuously sink into oblivion. They become part of that immediate past indissolubaly clinging onto the present which Husserl calls “retention”. While dealing with art, consciousness is forced to make the present moments disappear in order to make room for new impressions. This increases the potential material that out of its retentional position can be repeated to become present again. The more elements slip away, the more elements can be repeated. The same holds true the other way round. The more elements are repeated, the more “present”, timeless and unique the work of art becomes. By repetition the repeated elements transcend their position in time to become freely disposable units out of time. „Die Wiederholung bricht die Sequenzen aus Jetzt-Rentention-Reproduktion auf und konstituiert das Poetische als ein Jenseits aller linearer Formulierungen, als eine Sprachtranszendenz, als eine Sphäre der Nicht-Verstehbarkeit.“(5) The literal is therefore already inscribed with the potentiality of repetition that marks the literal with a difference. Vice versa repetition draws on the singularity of the event for its very source of being. For what would there be to repeat but individual actions? If the question of repetition is intricately linked with our concept of identity, repetition opens up a space for the subject to hesitate, to stop moving and to move differently each time it repeats itself. Here, the subject may act itself out in its potentiality. This dangerous realm of difference, it seems, is therefore linked to the potential space of theatre and, more precisely so, the realm of dance. After all, both Zenon and Heraklit describe subjects or objects in motion -an arrow that moves or presumably does not move through space and time and a subject that goes into the water only to dissolve itself in the flow of time. Looking at the three solos of the young German dancer and choreographer Tom Plischke, the „Stocken“ becomes the space of the dancing subject. It becomes the space where something gels, where something becomes motionless while still moving.
2. Repetition as Differentiation of the Body
Already his first solo Fleur which he created in his final year as a student at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels in the spring of 1998 plays with the notion of forgetting. The solo which Tom Plischke dances himself tries to forget the dancer’s body by constantly shifting focus between two different bodies. The first body is that of a trained dancer which flows easily across the empty stage while circling its arms and spinning gently giving in to the body’s weight and shifting it easily. Dancing, Plischke even falls to the floor only to elegantly rise again in what seems to be one continuous movement. Every now and again the flow of movement gels and stops irritating our perception. Plischke’s arms are squarely stretched out behind his back. As they writhe his torso is being pulled forward as if by a strange force, a scene which contrasts strongly with the effortlessness of his previous movements. Within that body, it seems, there is a second body trying to break free which emerges unexpectedly every time the dancer accidentally strokes his neck with his hand thereby literally stopping the flow in order to become completely absorbed in an autoerotic gesture of self-discovery. It is a private body that comes into being here, an older body that was transformed into a dancer’s tool and whose history was forgotten in favour of a perfect dance technique.
The solo comes back to the motif of falling in its second scene. The falling body here, however, is not the one of release technique. It is a fall into oblivion of the subject as Plischke crashes to the floor having lost consciousness of himself. The young dancer puts on his jacket and his shoes which he had taken off at the beginning of the show to start his dance phrase and comes to the fore. He pulls out a comb, combs his hair and puts it back in a gesture of everyday activity. He slightly lifts the right leg of his trousers, discovers that his shoe laces are undone, bends down, stops short as if he had forgotten what he was about to do and falls down. Over and over again this little scene is repeated compulsively yet it is never resolved. After having lit his face with a flash light that revealed a head spinning and rotating without orientation, Plischke comes back to the dance phrase of the beginning mixing it with ever increasing perky and jerky movements until the solo grinds to a halt. The personal gesture of not being able to tie one’s shoe-laces is outdone near the end by an even more personal, even intimate gesture: that of urinating on stage. Plischke, whose private biological body has dissolved the dancer’s perfect tool in a puddle of water, takes a step aside and starts jerking all over again.
Fleur presents the loss of an identity and the shaping of another through stops, which open up a field of remembering and forgetting. Repetition here works in favour of a differentiation of the body, of its splitting into two. The repetition that in Freud’s writings repeats the absolutely unrepeatable brings itself to self-destruct. The subject is crushed with every fall to the floor. While falling, however, it introduces another body, a vulnerable body, which is antithetical to the dancing body. It is the gesture of emancipation for a dancer who refuses to become a spoke in the wheel of dance routines as well as a statement on the state of the art of dance where techniques like „Release“ that once were considered liberating have become the new norm. Their erstwhile revolutionary impact has long since lost its meaning to consumer wellness and esoteric soul searching. As a way out, Fleur suggests the remembrance of the imperfect, flawed and vulnerable body. It is remembered, however, not as a natural body suddenly taking centre stage. In Plischke’s Fleur it comes into being only as a constant negotiation between a dancer’s trained body and its source material that is allowed to come into the open through the stops that transport the body elsewhere.
3. Repetition Compulsion
The wild disoriented head movements re-appear right at the beginning of Tom Plischke’s second solo, L’homme À SORTIR AVEC son corps which was premiered in November of 1998. The title refers to a phrase by the French theatre visionary Antonin Artaud who dreamt of a theatre that would invite „l’homme à sortir avec son corps“. „A sortir avec“, to go out for a walk with one’s body, has the ring of freedom to it as well as the more disquieting implication that in order to go out for a walk with your body, you have to be dissociated from your body, you have to be out of your body. You would have to encounter it as an object, a separate entity outside of yourself which, of course, immediately begs the question were that ‘self’ could then be located. Inspired by the drawings Artaud made while in Rodez, the psychiatric ward where, from 1943 to 1945, he was treated with 51 electroshocks that would indeed rob him of his body and his freedom, Plischke composes four images that deal with the idea of freedom in different ways. Even after the immense pain had subsided, the shocks left Artaud with an effect of being divested of his own body. In a letter to Dr. Latremolière dated from 6th January 1945 Artaud writes: “Herr Latremoliére, der Elektroschock bringt mich zur Verzweiflung, er nimmt mir das Gedächtnis, er betäubt mein Denken und mein Herz, er macht aus mir einen Abwesenden, der weiß, daß er abwesend ist und sich wochenlang auf der Suche nach seinem Wesen befindet, wie ein Toter neben einem Lebenden, der nicht mehr er selbst ist, der sein Kommen fordert und bei dem er nicht mehr eintreten kann“.(6) Drawings like „Death and Man“ from the year 1946 reveal two separate thin figures whose limbs have no relation to each other. The two lines representing the body like electrical wire run parallel to one another only to lead into a stylised head which they neatly split into two. A second figure hovers over the first one. Its fleshy hands resting on one box each are far too large for its pencil thin shape. And never the twain shall meet. In his description of the drawing, Artaud links it with his experience of death passing or walking by. Man has fallen to the ground like a “straight ruler” while Death has stolen his two lungs, the two boxes the insect-like death-figure rests its hands on.(7)
The solo begins with the image of a man whose jacket is far too large for his torso. It immediately makes one think of a straight-jacket especially since Plischke’s arms and hands are confined within. The sleeves which flap about wildly as if disconnected from the body sport two huge hands taken straight from Artaud’s drawing. As the dancer shakes his head and aimlessly yet forcefully steps up and down the stage suddenly a third arm appears popping out of the jacket. With its golden colour its glistens in the three spot lights that line the right side of the stage. The golden colour, which also covers the bare feet of the dancer, transfigures the arm into something surreal, realer than real, an object of desire that signifies the phantasm of freedom that is denied to the rest of the body. In the second image Plischke, right arm raised and stretched out above his head, strides up and down the stage in forceful steps. Voices and cheerful music can be heard, the soundtrack to Germany’s re-unification festivities in 1990. The third image sees a naked Plischke probing his body with a microphone producing distinct sounds by hitting his body. Every time he hits the skeleton, a sharp sound can be heard. When he hits the flesh a deep thud emerges. Compulsively he rubs the microphone around his navel until a red ring appears. Finally, Plischke again and again hits a table with his arm bringing his torso down like an animal shot down and brought to the slaughter. Beethoven’s Third Sinfonie, the Eroica, is accompanying the image. Beethoven dedicated it to Napoleon who he thought would liberate Europe until he crowned himself to become emperor.
In all of the four images the idea of freedom is an ambiguous one already containing its opposite. The phantasm of breaking out of a straight jacket isolates the limbs of the body, breaking it up and reducing it to a collection of individual fetishes to be desired. The jubilatory gesture of a nation breaking free of a dictatorship here resembles the gesture once used to salute Hitler. The lustful and autoerotic discovery of one’s body hurts the body until it bleeds. Repetition here does not so much create a second non-dance body but it oscillates between pleasure and pain, freedom and compulsion. In his Theatre of Cruelty Antonin Artaud suggests a theatre that does not signify in the sense that it does away with the master narratives of our Western theatre tradition.(8) Freed from the burden of the dramatic text, each element of the performance should become equally important cruelly hitting our senses only with its specific sensory impact. Tom Plischke hints at this possibility by enriching his images with sounds that together with the strong visuals are woven into a texture. Voices from Artaud’s radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu can be heard, voices that not so much transport messages but which focus on vocalic qualities such as tone, timbre and pitch. They speak of bodily functions such as defecating and urinating trying to evoke and re-install a body before it was taking prisoner by civilization and its demands of self-control. Artaud makes frequent use of writing in and on his drawings thus calling them “geschriebene Zeichnungen, mit Sätzen, die sich in die Formen einheften, um sie umzustürzen”.(9) Writing that is inscribed in the picture subverts or topples the picture because it is a picture or a pictogramme itself, but one that transcends the borderline between the heard and the seen. It intruduces, as Jacques Derrida would have it, the glossolalie into the picture, because letters transcribe phonems. It is this kind of textual weawing of pre-semantic sounds that Plischke engages in when he pierces his images and his body with the threads of a rich tapestry of voices and sounds that make his body-pictures also heard (by the microphone noises, by the crashing sound on the table) and not only seen.
In Jacques Derrida’s reading of Artaud, the Theatre of Cruelty is an impossible theatre.(10) According to Derrida, Artaud dreams of a theatre of hieroglyphs that would not signify because they are in an original act of creation unique and unrepeatable like the vitalistic stream of life itself. Artaud envisions a theatre without repetition like a body without organs, a body that is not structured into distinct units but which becomes a centre for intensities that run through it freely. In order, however, to be at all intelligible and sensible within the framework of a symbolic structure like the new language Artaud tries to establish, these hieroglyphs must inevitably be repeatable. Without their knowing, they would always already be on their way to becoming signs. The cruelty of Artaud’s theatre is therefore not one of physical violence with which the boundary between art and life is torn down. It results from the impasse between event and repetition, between the striving for a powerful intensity that does not signify and its inbuilt necessity to be repeated in order to be felt and understood as a theatrical language however different to the spoken language it may be.
If repetition is the condition sine qua non of the sign, which, as semioticians remind us, is always meaningful, it is precisely through repetition as an artistic strategy that meaning can be destroyed. It is in this sense repetition works as compulsion in L’homme À SORTIR AVEC son corps. Repetition destroys meaning like a stutter interrupts or stops the meaningful completion of a sentence . It subverts the meaningful gesture with every repetitive instant thus breaking the chain of signifiers by insisting on the repeated action as unique action that refuses to go away. It is here, that Lobsien’s chiastic link between the literal and the repeated comes into play again only to take on a more radical meaning. In his reading of Husserl’s phenomenology, Derrida stresses the impossibility of the present moment ever being present. For if the moment immediately sinks into the position of retention then the present is only ever constituted by its repeated turning back from the past. Derrida calls this point of return the “pli”. “Das lebendige Präsens entspringt aus einer Nicht-Identität mit sich und aus der Möglichkeit der retentionalen Spur. Es ist allemal eine Spur. Diese Spur ist von einem Präsens her undenkbar, dessen Lebens ich selbst innerlich wäre. Das „Sich“ des lebendigen Präsens ist ursprüngliche eine Spur. (…) Denn die Ursprünglichkeit muß von der Spur her und nicht umgekehrt gedacht werden.“(11) What is primary is therefore never the object repeated, but the act of repetition itself. The subject whose being is subject to time therefore only comes into being by an incessant play of differences, that defers its identity.
By repeating violent gestures, Plischke empties the gesture to turn it into an unreadable sign in the sense of Lobsien’s “Nicht-Verstehbarkeit”. The repetition stops the action as it refuses to become both a story and history. Forever present, yet empty, the gesture draws our attention to the materiality of the body and its suggestive potential. The images Tom Plischke creates of his body are cruel because they are violent. They are violent, because they divest the body of meaning by repeating the unrepeatable. In Gilles Deleuze’s terms, what we witness here is not a simple act of repetition, but an “ontological repetition” or a “third repletion”, that only brings itself to the fore. “La frontière n’est plus entre une première fois et la répétition qu’elle rend hypothétiquement possible, mais entre les répétitions conditionnelles et la troisième répétition, répétition dans l’éternel retour qui rend impossible le retour de deux autres.”(12) This repetition of the Nietzschean eternal return is a repetition to end all repetitions. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud calls it the death-drive. Plischke here not only repeats violent acts but the very act of repeating makes them violent orienting them towards the Freudian death-drive. From this perspective they are linked again to Artaud’s experiences both in Rodez and in his aesthetics which prefer intensities over intentions by means of repetition. Tinged with the notion of death, meaning its constant dying away, its fleetingness, repetition intensifies the experience of the moment only to open it up towards other possibilities. Freedom in Plischke’s solo becomes thus an empty gesture that is, however, as is always the case with freedom, full of future potential.
4. Repetition and Perception
Created in February 1999 in Frankfurt, Demgegenüber Borniertheit shifts the focus of repetition away from the level of the performance onto the level of the spectators’ perception. Tom Plischke created this solo for dancer Alice Chauchat who during the performance is seen to repeat the same movement phrase four times. The phrase is just over four minutes long and begins with Chauchat standing still and facing the audience. To an electronical beep she enters the stage in a t-shirt and a pair of everyday trousers. With every repetition she changes costumes in front of a video projection that shows her riding on a bus, eating and walking down a street. The camera image is a close-up of her face thus creating a sharp contrast to the frail woman we see on stage. She takes off the t-shirt to put on a blue leotard and a pair of white tights that turn her into a ballerina during rehearsal. Next comes a short black or red dress as if she wanted to get ready for dinner in a fancy restaurant. Through the repeated beeps Frank Sinatra’s song „Water to Drink“ strives to break free. It is cut up in loops that are repeated irregularly before the song is finally allowed to progress after numerous interruptions. After the third repetition, the music suddenly stops. Alice Chauchat puts on a pair of rather unattractive rubber boots that contrast with her elegant dinner dress. She brings on a bucket with sand, dresses it with the white tights and the blue leotard she wore before, sits down and holds it next to herself: two bodies equally made up, two different images of a dancer. The ludicrous bucket-ballerina, whose flaccid arms and legs half filled with sand present a rather deplorable image of the body, looks like a deflated ballerina, a ballerina after her imaginary trimmings and fantasmatic projections of what she is, represents and wants to be have been stripped away. The bucket is the real of the dancer’s image: a collection of insubstantial fragments that only become a desirable, imaginary, and larger than life whole, like the golden limbs in the Plischke’s Artaud-solo, in the realm of fantasies. Without those fantasies, as Slavoj Zizek never tires to tell us, the object of desire would be nothing – a deflated piece of cloth and an empty bucket. The ballerina would not find her full reflection in the chain of signifiers that constitute our desire.(13) After yet another costume change - Chauchat puts on the tights and the t-shirt - the dance phrase is repeated once more. After it has finished, she paints her lips red, puts on the rubber boots and stands motionless underneath her moving video image while Frank Sinatra’s song can finally be heard in its entirety.
It is obvious that Tom Plischke and Alice Chauchat here play with images of the feminine „Baby Doll“ as a line in Sinatra’s song has it. In the first three sections they represent them only to mix them up gleefully in the last two sections. They point at the construction of images by creating absurd and incongruous mixtures of the elegant and the rural, the everyday and the professional. What is more important, however, is how these images relate to the movement and its repetition. Although the small dance is identical each time, we perceive it as being different. We want to see difference where there is only repetition as if our mind were unable to deal with an identical replication, as if our mind could not help but progress. As time goes by, we begin to imagine things, to construe our own meanings where there plainly are none. Isn’t the movement balletic now that she is wearing a dancer’s costume? Isn’t it mundane now that she is wearing a dress? The same movement, it seems, can acquire a different meaning in a different context. It can mean different things to different people. As trivial as it may sound here, however, the solo also puts an end to one of the pet subjects of Modern Dance, namely that movement is meaningful in itself. It never lies, as Martha Graham once said, because it is expressive of the soul. In relation to reality or the brute facts our perception is indeed, as the title Demgegenüber Borniertheit suggests, limited. It sees what it wants to see and makes things up as it goes along.
In Tom Plischke’s third solo, repetition plays tricks on our mind. Since time is our being and consciousness only exists in time, we cannot help but transform the singular event into a repetitive action which acquires difference. This, however, puts an end to repetition in the strict sense of the term. Since repetition transports things to another time and space, the things repeated are never the same. They lose their identity on the way, because the contexts they are in are neither stable nor limited. If Demgegenüber Borniertheit emphasises this side of the spectrum, L’homme À SORTIR AVEC son corps, on the other hand, destroys meaning by excessive repetition. It transforms difference in time into an event that refuses to signify thereby linking it ontologically to Freud’s third repetition: the death-drive. Fleur< situates itself in the gap between repetition and difference that opens up as a „Stocken“, a stop, each time things are repeated. In limbo, it creates a second body out of the dancer’s body. The interruption, that instant of forgetfulness preceding every repetition, becomes the space for a body to move in, a body that is the potential of a body. The impossibility of movement, that Zenon suggests, as a discontinuity of time and space, here opens up the memory of another body that destabilises the dancer’s body in performance. Unlike in the ancient logical paradox, as human beings we cannot dissociate time from space. For us movement is therefore at least always possible. Tom Plischke’s solos suggest that this is a possibility, however, that depends upon the paradox of difference, repetition and the gap in between.
Notes
(1) Aristoteles, Physik, Z9.239b9-30.
(2) Samuel Weber, „Vor Ort: Theater im Zeitalter der Medien“, in: Gabriele Brandstetter/Helga Finter/Markus Wessendorf (eds.), Grenzgänge: Das Theater und die anderen Künste, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998, 31-51, (here: 37).
(3) Sigmund Freud; „Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten“, in: ders.,Gesammelte Werke Band X, Frankfurt a.M: S.Fischer Verlag, 1999, 126-136.
(4) Eckhard Lobsien, Wörtlichkeit und Wiederholung, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995, 7-32.
(5) Lobsien, op. cit., 193.
(6) Quoted in: Paule Thévenin, „Ein Rebell der Kunst“, in: Gerhard Fischer et al. (eds.), daedalus-Die Erfindung der Gegenwart, Basel, Frankfurt a.M: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990, 325-247 (here: 237).
(7) Ibid., 250/251. For Artauds drawings, see also: Paule Thévenin/Jacques Derrida, Antonin Artaud: Zeichnungen und Portraits, München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1986.
(8) Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, London: John Calder, 1977.
(9) Jacques Derrida, „Das Subjektil ent-sinnen“, in: Thévenin/Derrida, 51-109 (here : 62).
(10) See Jacques Derrida, „Die soufflierte Rede“, in: ders., Die Schrift und die Differenz, Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 1976, 259-301; sowie: Jacques Derrida, „Das Theater der Grausamkeit und die Geschlossenheit der Repräsentation“, in: ders., op.cit., 351-379.
(11) Jacques Derrida, Die Stimme und das Phänomen, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979 (1967),142/143.
(12) Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétion, Paris : PUF, 1968, 379; see also: Lobsien, op.cit. 226/227.
(13) See for example: Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997.