ABSTRACT

This chapter argues for a different understanding of the relationship between dance as an embodied practice and the various medial forms dance can take. The author holds that theater and dance are inherently medial, which allows for a remediation of their practices and conventions in various other media. Abandoning the notion of a medium specificity of dance, contemporary dance practices often include other media to the point where the medial representations replace the dancing. What the author suggests in the following is to consider the body and its movements together with their medial doubles as constellations. These constellations reveal the inherent mediality of the body and its movements. The theater exposes these conventions; it is the space where the body and its movements are separated to be reconfigured. The author bases the argument of this chapter on Walter Benjamin’s writings on Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater and Samuel Weber’s reading of Benjamin. The author considers Walter Benjamin’s media theory to be implied in the author’s theory of gesture as a citable constellation of bodies. Walter Benjamin’s notion of gesture and Samuel Weber’s concept of “theatricality as medium” give rise to an understanding of certain contemporary dance practices as post-medium practices (i.e., Rosalind Krauss and Peter Osborne). The works of choreographers Jérôme Bel and William Forsythe serve as the examples in this chapter.