Dance, Music and Dramaturgy: collaboration plan and dramaturgical apparatus

Abstract:

The unfolding of the concept of dramaturgy and the problematics of contemporary choreography are, today, a vast and diverse field of research, bearing numerous disclosures that lead to their reciprocal implication. Apart from that, dance and music share significant complementary ties allowing for the consideration of a common compositional inquiry. Reflecting on the compositional processes of dance and music, this article cross-examines the collaboration between choreographers and composers, integrating the incidence of dramaturgy in the strategies of choreographic and musical composition.

Keywords:
Composition; Choreography; Music; Collaboration; Dramaturgy

Resumo:

Os desdobramentos do conceito de dramaturgia e as problematizações da criação coreográfica contemporânea são hoje um vasto e diversificado campo de pesquisa, tecido por inúmeras linhas de fuga que orientam a sua recíproca implicação. Além disso, a dança e a música partilham laços de complementaridade expressiva que propiciam a ponderação de uma questão composicional comum. Refletindo sobre os respectivos processos composicionais, este artigo interroga a colaboração entre coreógrafos e compositores musicais, integrando a incidência da dramaturgia nas estratégias de composição coreográfico-musical.

Palavras-chave:
Composição; Coreografia; Música; Colaboração; Dramaturgia

Résumé:

Les développements du concept de dramaturgie et la problématisation de la création chorégraphique contemporaine sont, aujourd'hui, un vaste et diversifié champ de recherche, tissé par des nombreuses lignes de fuite qui guident leur implication mutuelle. De plus, la danse et la musique partagent des liens de complémentarité expressives ce qui favorise la pondération d'un problème de composition commun. En réfléchissant sur les processus de composition chorégraphique et musicale, cet article est une étude sur la collaboration entre les chorégraphes et compositeurs, intégrant l'incidence de la dramaturgie sur les stratégies de composition.

Mots-clés:
Composition; Chorégraphie; Musique; Collaboration; Dramaturgie

If we think only about the disciplinary spheres of choreographic creation and musical composition, what will naturally emerge are the technical and idiomatic implications of their operability, as far as their articulation synthesizes the full composition of the work. However, if we reverse the direction of this bias, and start from the performative unity to the compositional processes that engendered it, the collaborative systems gain a different visibility. In them are gathered the integrated compositional efforts and their operational apparatus, however in a wider pondering plan: what we are looking for here, is precisely what is beyond the individual composition work, and what is moving between the collaboration and the virtual expressive uniqueness of a choreographic and musical work. This article intends to question the operative resources that will produce the expressive and conceptual convergence of the work. It problematizes the entailed plan between the two compositional processes (that of dance and that of music) on the scope of an artistic collaboration between choreographers and musical composers. The ambition of these pages is not to outline a specific collaborative profile, or to generalize, with a standard model, the endless diversity of procedures that characterize each experience of collaboration. Rather, the authors of this article try to attend, in the dialogism of collaboration, some possibilities of approximation between the confused ontological complexity of the performative phenomenon and the interpretation of its compositional contingencies. With that goal we will cross the bridge that connects the consciousness to the world, seeking in the cognitive mechanisms the access to the intersubjective involvement plans and their production of meaning networks; peering out the transit and the connectivity of the choreographic and the musical meanings, in this article we propose their supplementing with the concept of collaboration plan and their intermediation within the concept of the dramaturgical apparatus.

The illustration that follows (Figure 1) presents a type of a cartographic synthesis of these concepts, along with the movement of their implication in choreographic-musical composition processes. This diagrammatic foresight already displays the main tension that will lead the path settled by these lines - the ontological difference between immanence and representation, projected in the duality between the intensity of presence, and that of production of meaning. If the work, in a way it is offered to an observer, is a period during which heterogeneous immanence operate in an infinite derivation in the interior of its phenomenal oneness, the composition processes in themselves meet with a set of elements that are internally homogeneous, with the articulation of temporal parameters and movement of volumes, with poetic remissions and determining conceptualizations, with symbolic notations and exploratory experimentations, and finally, with the dialogued meanings in a network of connections that will constitute its own collaboration soft tissue. This way, the creative process of a choreographic and musical work tends to one heterological dialogism, a dialogue in which multiple languages participate in an unstable network of meanings in which heterogeneous semantics cross themselves - movement, sound, image, word - as well as cognitive intersubjective factors - perception, trouble, memory, intuition, intelligence and invention. It is on the articulation of these two plans - significance and intersubjectivity - that these pages project their paths of escape.

Finally, this article has a productive ambition to propose the reflection of choreographers and musical composers (and also to any performative arts creator) of a virtually rewarding debate about their compositional resources. Facing a work that is created along autonomous and disconnected compositional processes, we will only be able to speculate about the virtual advantages that a putative collaboration (of a bigger or smaller intensity) could have added to their actual artistic merit; but accepting that any compositional process is intrinsically transformative (regardless being, or not, included in a collaborative process), the enhancement of the production fields of intersubjectivity latent in each collaboration process may lead, in an intensive context of collaboration, in the precipitation of supplementary elements (with heterogeneous nature) in the compositional routines of each one of the creators - unpredictable and challenging elements, immanent to the collaboration itself and eccentric in the strict scope related with their individual creative work. This transforming potential will certainly be more effective, intense, and fluid, if the dialogism of collaboration is obtained. The experience of collaboration will be, in this assumption, a precious power to the artistic creation, with double incidence in the individual performance and in the eloquence of the work.

Figure 1
"The in-discipline of collaboration"

The Transit of the Meanings: representation, immanence and the collaboration plan

In fact, perception is only one side of the gap, and action is the other side. What is called action, strictly speaking, is the delayed reaction of the centre of indetermination. Now, this centre is only capable of acting - in the sense of organizing an unexpected response - because it perceives and has received the excitation on a privileged facet, eliminating the remainder (Deleuze, 1997, p. 64).

We cast in raw things a meaning. Only then we refer them. Deleuze (1997, p. 65) affirms that the affection we suffer from them is "a part of external movements that we 'absorb', that we refract, and which does not transform itself into either objects of perception or acts of the subject; rather they mark the coincidence of the subject and the object in a pure quality". In the gap between the perception and the affection, we understand from things their privileged face, the one that affects us activating our indetermination center over its diffuse whole, making us match with it: "things and perceptions of things are prehensions, but things are total objective prehensions, and perceptions of things are incomplete and prejudiced, partial, subjective prehensions" (Deleuze, 1997, p. 64). Only then we'll be able to rebuild, represent, isolate in that pure quality that is prior to any representation (during which we coincide with things) their symbolic material and eradicate it from time in order to think them in their synthesis of their acquired intensities. We are subjects that possess one face of our object. We can speak about it, simulate it. Things are not things any more, but concepts shaped in them expressing meanings. This way, those lived intensities of music and those of the body in movement become diluted, when they abandon their performative running time and transform themselves in a representation of thought. As José Gil states, "it's enough to imagine a movement standing in its opposite sides, closed, finished in all its constituent elements, energy, speed, quality, to be no more a dance" (Gil, 2001, p. 15).

If the creative process entangles a choreographer and a musical composer along the dialogue that will feed their effort of composition, music and movement will be surely present - as far as its fragmented presence is in progress - but their senses will be the ones that are founding the debate in the plan of a conceptual articulation, no matter what are their incidence or their complexity. Speaking about music and dance is, this way, to project their becoming¹² in the destiny of the work, arguing with the ideas that can be transformed in sound and movement, seeing in the sharing of the compositional justification a homogeneous curving that virtualizes the access to the heterogeneous immanence of the work. When we speak about a meaning, in what music or dance are concerned, we are not in line with the movement and with the sound that involves it through time and space anymore - we lose contact with the presence of its performative materiality and we dive in the fast-flowing river of our neural images. We leave behind the bodies involved by sound vibrations of music, their pure quality, absorbed and refracted from an extinct duration, to debate their perception in a transient game of similarities between representations. We make a dialogue. We speak about form and content. We speak about emotions. We make vibrations in metaphoric simulations, poetic suggestions, formal strategies, symbolic diagrams, musical or choreographic partitions, and mathematic formulations; therefore, the pre-compositional dialogue is a machine that translates the intangible intensities into the conscience figures, from perceptos and affects in represented perceptions and affections; a conference that has on its table symbolic connections that overlap, and whose becoming empties in the plan of composition of the work.¹³ Fragments of material - music and dance that were tried in studios, partial sections composed along the creative process - eventually contribute to it, supporting or denying arguments, challenging new idealities; we guide our senses to the world, as if they were antennas, trying to capture meaning in the intensities, but we can only aspire to the capture of simulations, or conceptual reminiscences. It's with them that we speak. If the intensity of the work only exists along its running time, it has anticipated itself virtually through the ideas of the creative process that had preceded it.

Thus, the dialogue about collaboration can be the plan (of fertilization, germination, and flow of ideas and representations) that precedes the composition, but which becoming already shelters its virtual existence: a collaboration plan understood as an unstable or movable architecture, with heterogeneous references, on a plan of immanency in which the meanings move themselves empirically and unfold on themselves, implying themselves in new processes of becoming, embracing renewed virtualities. The representations, on this plan, extend their roots by twitching the semantic logics over the compositional intuitions. To the meanings resulting from music and dance (under-resourced of intensity due to the deterritorialization imposed by the performance), will join all kinds of communicable representations which can be related to each other - words, gestures, images, sounds - that correspond to the intuition of their virtuality, walking together in a shared immanence, splitting out continuously in the diverging series¹⁴ of musical and chorographic thoughts. These are the series that set the eternal reappearance of representations with the individualized difference of their mutual involvement.

That multiplicity of representational logics that circulates between the divergent series of the choreographer and of the musical composer seems to be a central dialogical dynamic of their collaboration. From a confused original hank is unraveled the new nest of senses that are expanding beyond their own objects, unfolding their hidden faces and their hybrid contours in the unusual connections of the cooperative dialogue, which carries on weaving the involvement knots of their differences and giving the musical composers the basis for their compositional argumentation.

Compositional Effort, Cognitive Inventiveness and the Dialogical Operability

Composition is an effort. The effort of handling with the material, with forms, structures, movements, vocabularies, with a technique that splits its resistance and submits the continuous duration of conscience and the mutual implication of its images to an expressive materiality, one step after the other, creating an object that mirrors the intimate labyrinth of our neural patterns and the quality of our compositional abilities. Bergson refers to this subject as "[...] something that distinguishes, separates, solves in individualities and finally in personality the tendencies that were before mixed together in the original momentum of life" (Bergson, 1990, p. 22). Composing stabilizes (both in musical or choreographic terms) the movement of the ideas in the unregulated bending of their orbits, or along the continuous metamorphosis of its cloud of intangible forms. If the dialectics of collaboration arises from the porosity of the divergent series of both the musical composer and the choreographer, the composition effort configures a retreat, a recovery with the lonely nature of the compositional work. The composer Ianis Xenakis stated one day that "when one tries to write something he needs to feel absolutely alone, as if he was a flash in the darkness of the Universe. That's all. You are completely on your own"¹⁵. The choreographer and musical composer, provided with their specific compositional techniques, divide the dialectic of cooperation with Xenakis' solitude - as isolated flashes in parallel universes; the musical composer faces the resistance of sound masses, its volumes and its continuity; the choreographer challenges the silence of the dancer, the forces that surround and occupy him, in space and in time. The moments of compositional achievement produce a disruptive torsion that bisects the collaboration plan into two commitments, instantly diverging in quantum jumps that give birth to two different qualities of material, danced material and musical material (which will join or overlap, fuse or mix up in the heterogeneous immanence of the compositional plan of the choreographic and musical work). The duration of the collaboration work, however, doesn't interrupt, absorbing these material objects in new images and new immanence, intensifying the circulation of representations with the new remaining, new nexus, precepts and affections that feed and expand the gravitational field of the creative process.

If music and movement don't let themselves to be captured completely in the representable images, their creation equals to an unsteady and elusive process. Bergson says that "to make thinking become distinct, it must disperse itself in words" (Bergson, 1990, p. 22). During the lonely compositional processes, the confuse inventiveness of the ideas in mutual involvement is de-familiarized from its continuity and submitted to the effort of the representation managed by the compositional techniques, decomposed in meaningful unities and recomposed, using intelligence or intuition in an expressive continuity. But both processes (of musical composition and choreography) feed themselves with an interior impulse that leads to the thinking between the multiplication of the space - the eternal increasing confrontation with the new implication objects - and the difficulties of time - the eternal growing complexity of heterological complexity between those objects. On the assumption that during the individual efforts of musical composition, choreographic creativity and musical creation suffer a technical and operative separation, that can lead to a kind of a cooperative silence, the density of the collaboration plan is being defined in the flow of intensities, with which the circulation of images and concepts precedes to such efforts (and succeeds to them) in the way the intuition is nourished of those heterogeneous images, and in the form the intelligence spins/moves the web of its nexuses. This way, the quality of the collaboration plan seems to come from the cognitive skills that collaborators experience along the creative process. We can observe the same in the case of the collaboration plan where a peculiar theatre of the world is forged in the apprehension that from it the cognizing subjects and their significance (bringing to them their own meaning) are being made, while spectators of the represented things are also potential actors over the imagined ones. The collaboration plan is, this way, the source of a continuous production of intersubjectivity:

The concept of intersubjectivity is inseparable from the idea of production. Production of sensibility, thinking, desire, action forms. Production of ways to relate with yourself and with the world. Subjectivity isn't a data, a fixed point, an origin. The subject explains nothing before having its composition explained in a basis of a production field of subjectivity (Kastrup, 2007, p. 204).

The power of the concept of the collaboration plan - the dialogic quality which marks the identity of the creative processes - doesn't seem to lie so much on the representable sense of the objects that are in contact (or on their strict significance), as on the border that they draw between them, on the territory that at the same time joins and separates the representations, in that rapid movement that reinvents the world before the arising of the words and which diverges the arising words, to what answers our ability to transform and combine images and actions, in other words, our cognitive skills.

Virginia Kastrup, in her book called A invenção de si e do mundo differentiates two aspects of cognition. The first is related to the traditional studies of cognitive psychology and to the epistemological project of modernity set by the categories of subject - object, and to which she refers, in a critical way, as a recognition: "The great psychological systems understand the cognition field as a representation space (Kastrup, 2007, p. 21), considering that this space is oriented by the presumption of the invariability of the laws that regulate the cognitive systems of a subject, towards a stabilized and predictable empirical cutting of the objects. This way, acknowledgement solves the problems of perception through recognition of the repetitive structures and by producing the identity of the objects in the structures of intelligence, relegating the invention problems for the studies of the creativity: "Establishing the cognition as the representation doesn't necessarily have to ensure its true value, but it anchors it to the universal and invariant principles, which ensure them an operational system which is marked by repetition and by need" (Kastrup, 2007, p. 55).

The second object of the cognitive question lies, for Kastrup, precisely in the inclusion of the invention which is acknowledged as a potential to create the found problems, in the becoming of the objects introduced in the duration and occupation of the space that distances them from the subject, the plan of a cognitive practice that relates heterogeneous elements; not pure forms negotiated between subject and object anymore, but related material and social, ethological and technological vectors, sensory and semiotic, fluxes, or lines that don't close in perfect and total forms, but which in other way, absorb the remaining of the representation, opening gasps and fissures on the recognizable blocks, and producing the subjectivity. It is the plan of collaboration that fertilizes such subjectivity, which, simultaneously, gathers and separates choreographer and musical composer in the mutual management of their cognition. It is in the duration of the collaboration plan that cognition operates in a way of continuous drafting mode, and in that sense that the running time of collaboration offers the conditions to possess the possibilities of creation, transformation and other procedures; the inherent inventiveness of cognition allows to limits of recognition of the objects to extrapolate, and to reach their internal difference, thus opening the possibilities of displacement and opening to the virtuality of its becoming. Kastrup calls this movement the inventive cognition.

Therefore, by losing the universal and unchanged character of recognition, the created forms in their unstable contours and their transforming temporality give the origin to the actual, unpredictable and experimental results. Cognition itself is transformed in an invention, in what Kastrup names as the invented cognition: "Products of a temporal condition, the cognitive forms don't possess fixed and invariable limits, but remain shrouded in a kind of nebula, in a border of time that by marking its origin, ensures its redefinition and endless reinvention" (2007, p. 61). Musical composer and choreographer, along the collaboration plan, are mutually involved in a dialogue which becoming happens through the bifurcations and divergence related to itself, which is indiscernible from the production of the intersubjectivity, by the action and reaction of the inventive cognition. On the other hand, the heterological representations of the collaborative dialogism imply themselves continuously through the unpredictable links, generating a continuous production flow: new representations, new material, new apparatuses, and new compositional awareness.

In the dialogism of collaboration the complexity of the creative process seen as a whole is being projected like a space and time of the elaboration of the expressive uniqueness of the choreographic and musical work. The dialogue between choreographer and musical composer seems to arise as an invention process of itself and of the other, caused by the confrontation of heterogeneous representations, mutually argued, and also by the nexuses intuited about their remains. Obviously, they are musical and choreographic representations, but also conceptual, poetic, literary, scientific, and mathematic, and all kinds of representations that feed strategies of compositional invention, and are resulting from the inventive enquiring in the course of cognition. This way, the invention's role is not only in the compositional labour, but in great extent, is in the dialogical operability and in the net of the connections forged by the reconfiguration of the cognitive structures of the composers, whose instability is continually actualized by some invention.

The Divergent Series and the Dramaturgical Apparatus

If collaboration is dialogism, this word will be its interface. If objects and their representations in the inventive cognition of creators find a heterological connectivity (fitting together in the couplings or diverging in the frictions) that generates the combinatorial propositions in their invented connection, it is the word that provides agency to the circulation of the divergent series (the continuity of different points of view) that are virtualizing the choreographic and musical composition. An interface that reflects, more than it absorbs, the disjunctive flow of the significations in a constant becoming. This way, the word turns into a kind of tipper point around which the kinetic and musical virtualities rotate in divergent orbits, and that in turn split their path and converge to the centers of the determination of the distinct identities of the musical composer and of the choreographer, producing their different subjectivities and fertilizing their compositional effort. In the dialogism of collaboration, each representation, each sonority, each movement, each image, each poetic or imagery evocation, each mathematical formulation, lead further to the word that in concentric circles of significant irradiation returns their inventive power. A semantic instability circle involving the composers' identity nucleus, like an atmosphere animated by the multiple magnetic currents. In the extended conscience of each one the narrative of the elected faces of the word is taking place, in the organization of the individual series and in the double relation that links the thing that is seen to the subject that perceives it:

Identity is no less conserved in each component representation than in the whole of infinite representation as such. Infinite representation may well multiply points of view and organize these in series; these series are no less subject to the condition of converging upon the same object, upon the same world. Infinite representation may well multiply figures and moments and organize these into circles endowed with self-movement; these circles no less turn around a single centre which is that of the great circle of consciousness (Deleuze, 1994, p. 68).

If the words (in their synthetic and inventive ambivalence) provide agency to the meanings involved in the irradiation of the heterogeneous contents of the representations they refer to, and if on the other hand, the serialization of these representations unveils its becoming in the temporal ordering which emerges from the irradiation of their contents (the divergent series of the musical composer and that of the choreographer), the narrative that is built with these words (the ordination of the representations with agency) constitutes itself by starting from the productive connections of the operated collaboration on such representations, being ordered in their temporal relationships and virtualizing in their interior the affections and precepts immanent to the plan of composition of the work, serializing the chronological pulse of the meanings that have engendered it. There is a possible cartography, to which the representations converge and by its introduction it is composed, on the one hand, an open narrative in its continuous change - the chronological ordination of representations in uninterrupted updating of its becoming - and on the other hand, from where irradiate and to where converge the perspectives of the musical composer and the choreographer, as if it was a mirror with a double face where their identities look to themselves reflecting their own image or the image of the other (their representation, confusingly perceived in our own autobiographical conscience):

It is not enough to multiply perspectives in order to establish perspectivism. To every perspective or point of view it must correspond an autonomous work with its own self-sufficient sense: what matters is the divergence of the series, the de-centering of circles, 'monstrosity'. The totality of circles and series is thus a formless ungrounded chaos which has no law other than its own repetition, its own reproduction in the development of what which diverges and de-centers (Deleuze, 1994, p. 69).

In this cheerful choreography of intersubjective connections, we are trying to recognize an apparatus through which the dialogued word finds its connection anchors, its contact or overlapping points of these divergent series, or the lateral deviation poles of circles that unveil the "monster"; an apparatus through which the representations, connected in temporal relations of activation and iridescence, agency themselves as the areas of a contact or as the overlap areas between the conscience that virtualizes the dance and the conscience that virtualizes the music, and that over that give agency to a representation of their becoming. An apparatus that closes the running time of the piece, virtualized in the ordered implication of those contact zones. A dramaturgy with such duration. A dramaturgical becoming of enmeshed objects, full of extrinsic remissions, that establish the causal relations as a consequence of their ordering in a duration, or that order the duration in the process of the establishing of their causalities.

An apparatus, according to the concept of Giorgio Agambem, is "anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings" (Agambem, 2009b, p.14). The apparatus activates the relations between the living beings (or between the substances) on the plan of administration¹⁶ of their ontology, being able to awake and produce multiple processes of subjectivation. If the collaboration plan refers to the metabolism of the implication of the divergent series (the quality of the deviation of the circles of subjectivity), the dramaturgical apparatus stabilizes the network of the objects that animate them, orients their direction and strategically combines their power relations; in the rationality of such an apparatus are ordered speeches, poetics, glances, knowledge, procedures, experiments, methodologies, philosophical propositions, all that can become an involvement factor of an object with another, in its contact, overlapping, torsion, or unfolding zones. The apparatus activates all the connectors that virtualize the network of representations and their nexuses, "the apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements" (Foucault apud Agambem, 2009b, p. 2). Besides that, the production of subjectivity of cognition- inventive and invented - finds in the dramaturgical apparatus an instrument of power, as far as it gives itself as a reasoned operability in the ontology of collaboration - in its substantiality and in its extent- in other words, as power of a body-to-body action between the immanence of the world and the apparatus itself; the dramaturgical apparatus offers to composers the power of controlling Deleuze's monster, of intercepting it and acting on it.

Dramaturgy: genealogy and growth

We can finally say that in the dialogism of collaboration (in which achieved words and representations with agency anticipate, contain or virtualize the choreographic and musical composition), the apparatus finds its dramaturgical becoming. In order to clarify a bit more this movement, we can refer summarily to the growth that the proper concept of dramaturgy has been suffering since the emergence of modernism. Originally associated to the art of writing dramaturgical texts and to the principles and rules that orientate their production, the dramaturgical meaning bifurcates progressively along the 20thcentury, in more extensive semantic amplitudes. That expansion signalizes the evolution of the tensions established by the umbilical connection between word and its performative presentification. The words are not exclusively the representation of the concepts to which they refer; associated to typography, they reveal visible layers that expand the production of subjectivity. Associated to a period of duration, words are also the timbre of the voices, the rhythm and the intensity of elocution, the aggregated gesture, or the supplementary immanence of the oral skills. To put words on the scene ‒ to stage them ‒ implies doing a reading that orients their conversion in a performative time, in duration. This usage is a privilege of the director and it is in the historical prominence of the theatre directors that the expansion of the dramaturgy concept is founded; names as Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), Gordon Craig (1872-1966), Meyerhold (1874-1940), Bertold Brecht (1898-1956), Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), or more recently, Eugenio Barba (1936), have contributed to extend (in a significant way and by different reasons) the close relationship between dramaturgy and dramaturgical text. In their experimental investments, the reason was given to multiple and diversified conceptual branches of dramaturgy, deterritorializing its original meaning in the field of the word to scenic elaboration strategies and their contaminant effect of the space, of the scenography, of the music, of the illumination, of the outfit, or even the new forms of interpretation. From the 20th century until today the meaning of dramaturgy opens for a scenic operability with the divergent expression assets, in opposition to a traditional dramaturgical conception that was submitted in the dramaturgical text.

The task of this article is not to give the exhaustive exploitation of the historical issues concerning the displacement or growth of the dramaturgical concepts, neither the different and significant links that enunciate some other semantic derivations (such as a scene dramaturgy, actor dramaturgy, or performance dramaturgy etc.), but it is appropriate, however, to mark the emergence of the "dance-theatre" and of what has recently been called, a dramaturgy of the dance, because of what it represents for the conceptual appropriation of the structuring factors of dramaturgy by a choreographic composition. The dance-theatre designation remits to the German expressionism, but as it is known, its popularization and the irradiation of its influence in contemporaneous dance are inseparable from the work of Pina Bausch (1940-2009) and of her dance company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. More than creating a synthesis between dance and theatre, the concept of the dance-theatre proposes itself to the host, in the field of the choreographic creation, the inclusive articulation of codes, procedures and techniques generated by several expressive disciplines. According to the words of Ciane Fernandes (2012, p. 78),

Dance-theatre isn't only the summary of various arts, neither only the rupture of their borders, but the discovery that dance is present in all forms of art and in life, while the fundamental energetic and relational law of the matter, in boiling and at rest, in tension and relax, undulation, contrast, motivation.

Fernandes' definition establishes a focus in what we believe is not essential to our dialogue, linking the conceptualization of the dance-theater to the ontological multiplicity of a heterogeneous totality of the expressive materials, transversal among different arts. Generating the term the dramaturgy of the dance, the dance-theatre produces a synthesis of powerful functional effectiveness; at the same time, it absorbs a paradoxical compromise between linguistic semantics and the unstable significations of the danced movement and of the other expressivities that converge to its territory (as it happens with music). The production of a verbal meaning, intrinsically associated to the historical concept of dramaturgy, gains with the theatre-dance not only a mere expansion of its semantic implications with other supposed symbolic languages (discussion around this problematic is not part of this work), but also a new becoming. The suitable vocabulary chain of the concept of dance-theatre (as synthetic as enigmatic) casts the lights on the quality of its coupling; in the articulation between the representations of the word and the indiscernible contact zone of both. The ontological intensities of the dance draw the indiscernible contact zone of ones and the others. On the other hand, the dramaturgy of dance refers more to the result of collaboration between dramaturges and choreographers than to the stable procedures, or the ones that are endowed with functional, specific and recurrent properties. It refers more to the involvement of thinking of a specific choreographer with a playwright, than a construction of the significant systematic process of development of meaning. As an example, we can refer to the collaboration between Pina Bausch and the playwright Raimund Hoghe, the relation that was built throughout ten years as part of a mediation process among scenes creation and the consequences of their exploratory articulation, searching for the meaning of a word on one hand - through the texts creation or through oral diction of the interpreters - and representing a deep investment in the search of musical relations between the performativity of the dancers and the sound track on the other hand. Asked about his creative relation with Bausch, Hogue claimed: "I brought a bit of music, sometimes texts that she used in her presentations. But, above all, I was there to help with the structure, to place the things together" (Hoghe, 2010, p. 25). This set is not more than the fine network that gets entangled with the divergent series of danced actions, of verbal elocutions, of music, of changes of the scenery, of illumination temperatures, at last, the set that with the expressive polyphony of the divergent intensities, becomes deterritorialized and synthesized in the convergent nexuses. The collaboration between choreographers and playwrights has increased since the last decades of the 20th century, contributing to the strengthening and widening of the concept of dance dramaturgy seen as the operability of a decoding nexus, and as a heterological narrative structure, with a bigger or smaller incidence of an expressive abstraction. The playwright Marianne van Kerkhoven, accomplice of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker¹⁷refers to the dramaturgy, in many of her works, as a metamorphic process of meanings:

Whatever additional tasks - sometimes very practical and certainly highly varied - the dramaturge takes on in the course of an artistic process, there always remain several constants present in his work; dramaturgy is always concerned with the conversion of feeling into knowledge, and vice versa (Kerkhoven, 1994, p. 3).

What Kerkhoven tells us about seems to refer precisely to the chance of the representing of grips immanent to the choreographic composition plan (what is concerning the aspect of quality) in that which allows the one that holds the agency and extension (what is representing the aspect of quantity). We may naturally link these two poles to the tension between the deep and unpronounceable feeling of movement and to its manageable surface, its clipping, its interpretation, and juxtaposition possibilities. If Kerkhoven refers to a conversion project, Heidi Gilpin (who worked together with William Forsythe¹⁸), defines her dramaturgical production as the translation of "ideas that could be linguistic, mathematical, or scientific into another form and try to create a ground with the choreographer where our mutual obsessions can interact" (Gilpin, 2000, p. 13). Gilpin looks to dramaturgy of the dance as a vehicle of negotiated transduction between a choreographer and playwright; if the reference to the mutual obsessions signalizes the intersubjective connection of the two creators, the translation of the ideas proceeds to their sectioning in differentiated representation and conceptual vectors of synthesis. André Lepecki (2000), who is the play-writer of several pieces of Meg Stuart,¹⁹ refers to the expression "metaphoric explosions" as a place where the irradiation meanings are intuited with the ethical and aesthetical connections, a cast whose proprieties derive from a dramaturgical appropriation of the abstract mechanics where movement, music, space and time and even word - submerged in an ocean of functional derivations - elaborate and move in a ductile and unstable body. Lepecki's metaphorical explosion puts us in front of the unexpected and unpredictable connections of objects within the path of their own representation, facing the introduction of fissures in the stability of their recognition; this explosion happens in the microscopic period of time during which the subjectivity that leads the production of meaning is formed - the becoming of the identity of a pre-verbal conscience.

Finally, the role of the dance playwright is characterized by Kerkhoven as the "external eye" of the choreographer's labour, in a chain of reciprocity that impounds, transforms and returns the configuring structures:

Dramaturgy is also the passion of looking. The active process of the eye; the dramaturge as the first spectator. He should be that slightly bashful friend who cautiously, weighing his words, expresses what he has seen and what traces it has left; he is the 'outsider's eye' that wants to look 'purely' but at the same time has enough knowledge of what goes on the inside to be both moved by and involved in what happens there. Dramaturgy feeds on diffidence (Kerkhoven, 1994, p. 4).

Lepecki questions this concept by the distance that he implies between the thought and matter/subject. For him, the task of the playwright is to penetrate in the substance of the creation, to dive in the deep ocean where his confuse and continuous heterogeneous multiplicities overlap one over the other, and in which the flow of their intensities here and there casts the light on the homogeneous, different and discrete images. To do that, he needs a new body and a new meaning, a body which is competent to receive stimulus in all his nerve endings, able to transmit a conscience of not only visual images, but also of audible and somatosensory ones, and finally being able to expand the cognition and face the resistance to signification, inventing the implication of his qualitative varieties:

I deeply believe that dance dramaturgy implies the reconfiguration of one's whole anatomy, not just the eyes. When I enter into the studio to start working on a new piece, the question of anatomy becomes a very important and quite literal question. [...] The thing is that I can reinvent this eye. For instance, I can make it listen. Or I use it to lick and taste the scene. So, to summarize: I enter in the studio as dramaturge by running away from the external eye. Just as the dancers and the choreographer, I enter to find a (new) body (Lepecki, 2000, p. 29).

In the dance studio dramaturgy receives its representations, weaving the texture of meanings in layers that not only overlap, but they penetrate one into the other, molding their becoming in the materiality of the bodies in the movement and in the expressive virtualities of the universe where they last. From this extent emerges a narrative of the unstable senses, a narrative that can by itself make the representation capable of creating the points of contact between the divergent series of dancing, of music²⁰ and of the other elements that actualize themselves with the same simultaneity, molding the intensities of their duration.

The dramaturgical apparatus appears in this study with the genealogical delay of the conceptual expansion of dramaturgy. In the same way, it opens itself to the invention of contact, overlapping, torsion, or unfolding zones between the chorographical objects and the musical objects, actuating their connectors and virtualizing their nexuses. In this facet, it comes closer to Deleuze's abstract machine, to a mutation machine that operates by decoding and deterritorialization. It must not, however, be confused with a dramaturgy, both in its originality and in its historical derivations. It doesn't only represent the work, but the negotiation of an implication and of the temporality of the objects that orient the compositional effort, configuring an instrument that regulates the twinning between the cognitive inventiveness of the composers and the invented substance of the composition. We are interested in such a dramaturgical apparatus as a becoming, which can be updated in a script, in a simple or complex partition, in a table that orders, or in a diagram that orients, in a single intensive concept, or in an extensive conceptual plan, simply put, in a poem seen as a world's gesture, or in a prose that convokes it, in the immanence of an image, or in the images-movement of a film, in the inclusive architecture of all this, or, even in its radical neutralization, that confines the divergence of the series to its random convergence in a duration - as John Cage and Merce Cunningham dared to do; a dramaturgical apparatus whose becoming is defined by the creator, while being-in-the-world, in front of a plural abyss, heterogeneous, immanent and remissive, in an endless openness to the ontological multiplicity of a collaboration, and to the inventive complicity of the collaborators.

The Compositional Becoming of a Dramaturgical Apparatus

The dramaturgical elaboration, just like the composition, requires an effort. The dramaturgical apparatus agencies its own management with the material (the composition shared with the signifying relations perceived from the dance of immanent idealities in the collaboration plan), which will result definitely in the stabilization of images and concepts that will orientate, in their turn, the creation of both music and movement, in a sphere of cooperative involvement with the divergent series of musical and choreographic thinking. The map created by the dramaturgical apparatus is, this way, the visible side of the collaboration plan. But this collaboration plan doesn't run out in the operability of the dramaturgical apparatus, it rather nourishes itself from it, in order to expand itself in the multiple divergent polarities, that bring closer or move away the musical composers, that create the points of contact and routes of abandonment between the compositional logics, which underline expressive complicities, or start the rough autonomies. The paradoxical recurrence of divergent replications of words, or of images (whose projection over the autobiographical consciences²¹ of both the musical composer and the choreographer produce the distinct cuttings or processing) transforms the dramaturgical apparatus in a trigger for the erratic implications between the decentralized circles of the composers, in a plan of collaboration which constitutes itself as an unstable and unpredictable organism, but in whose alveoli is being inscribed the compliance of a single becoming; a becoming which virtualizes the work and its compositional plan, that anticipates the unicity of its duration.

Thus, although it doesn't come to an end because of it, the dramaturgical apparatus represents, in its functional actualization, the material of collaboration; as far as it can in an inaccurate and inconstant border between the expressions and divergent operabilities, emphasize the empirical ordination of a virtual convergence, actualizing it in a dynamical, functional and productive representations system. There is a kind of meta-dramaturgy implicit in the operability of the dramaturgical apparatus, which not only feeds itself from the production of meanings between representations, as orchestrates its own collaborative gestures and functional implications. Besides the link that the dramaturgical apparatus provides during the production of nexus in dramaturgy, in order to orientate the production of a composed material, it acts in the process of the enlargement of the other's perception, as far as it creates new connections between his compositional gesture and the original assumptions of the collaborative dialogism. The dramaturgical apparatus, in its intrinsic inventiveness, brings the ontology collaborators closer to a dual creative process, competent to aggregate a silent solitude of the composer and to reflect it in the new cognitive objects that allow the reinvention of the image of the other, renovating the empirical data of a collaboration and promoting the unedited possibilities of the convergence between the choreographic thought and the musical thought. In the metabolism of collaboration plan, the dramaturgical apparatus then agencies its own composition gesture. In contrast to a choreographic or musical composition, it doesn't presuppose a specific technique or specific abilities. First of all, it spins in the continuous flow of the collaboration plan; the operative resources that produce expressive effectiveness and that empirically adhere to a program of a conceptual convergence between the choreographic invention and the musical one. The techniques and the compositional skills of a choreographic-musical dramaturgy (understood as narrative of nexus and causalities between heterological representations) are conquered in the tissue of the creative process itself, in the course of the cognitive specificities of their subjects, reflecting the inventiveness of their mutual implication.

The In-Discipline of the Collaborative Becoming

Through this already long journey we have verified that the eloquence of the plan of composition does not derive from the mere sum of dance and music disciplines; it derives, as a final point, from the agency operated by the cognition on their divergent series. Shall it exist, nevertheless, the chance of choosing, in the compositional processes, a methodological plan of procedural self-organized gestures? Shall it be possible to find in a collaborative becoming the outline of a disciplinary field? Without damage to the expansion of this horizon of research, many considerations expressed along this study suggest the improbability of success in such a demand. We got closer to the potential richness of the choreographic-musical collaboration, inferring, precisely, the possibility of surpassing the categories used to delimit the specificities of the disciplines of music and choreography.

Nevertheless, the route underlined throughout these pages now claims for a productive outcome. Although the difficulty to determine a specific confluence of theory, method and discursive models able to outline the edges of a discipline dedicated to artistic collaboration subsists, a catalogue of objects with interest, singularities and interdisciplinary relations exists in such discipline, orienting us in that direction. In fact, if from the reading of these pages reverberates a sense of multiplicity inherent to compositional processes, which resists to representation or to categorization - an anthology of the relentless present to the mere confrontation of the compositional disciplines of music and dance - such a meaning signals, nevertheless, a horizon of action and the possibility of a virtual collaborative procedure. This way, our proposal directs, freely and for our immediate rule, the qualification of choreographic-musical collaboration as an "in-discipline"²²; neither the discipline of dance, nor that of music, but the in-discipline of the collaborative becoming between choreographic composition and musical composition.

The intersubjective exposure to the experience of collaboration - a movement that is actualized in the co-presence, in face of the ontological multiplicity of the creative process - finds in the dialogic performance its eminent channel for agency. As experience is a way to produce intensity and meaning, its incidence is, in the large scale, pre-representational; on the other hand, in the dialogical relation between choreographer and musical composer the intangible intensities are converted in figures of conscience, allowing the traffic of representations (deterritorialized in their ontological difference) to enter in the continuous movement of the inventive cognition. The empirical occurrences are translating themselves in a network of meanings which surpass its own objects, revealing unusual connections in the heterological architecture of intersubjectivity. Movement and sound projects translate themselves the same way (as space and time phenomena) in the networks of cognition and in the structures of intelligence. During the collaboration plan length (as plan of immanence), a dialogue grows whose becoming takes place through the bifurcations and divergence in relation to itself, giving an agency to the actualization of compositional becoming in the implication of the divergent series of the choreographer and of the musical composer.

Furthermore, our collaborative in-discipline offers an instrument of effective operability which acts on these divergent series, stabilizing the network of the objects that animate them, orientating their direction and strategically combining their balance of power. We assign to this instrument the designation of dramaturgical apparatus, to be understood as the temporal ordination of representations, meanings, or concepts that circulate around the collaboration plan, implying them in an open narrative, serializing their chronological pulse and virtualizing the convergence points of the choreographic and musical composition gestures. The singularity of each dramaturgical apparatus is indiscernible from the singularity of each collaborative becoming; it is the visible face of each collaboration plan, giving the agency to the operative resources that produce expressive effectiveness and empirically adhere to a conceptual convergence program between choreographic and musical invention.

Let's believe that a dialogue between the musical composer and the choreographer, faced with the eventual opacity that is reciprocally felt between the disciplinary specificities of music and dance, can reach, by the in-discipline of collaboration, the real magnitude of its power. The broad commitment to an experience of collaboration is a dive with the other, in an ocean crossed by multiple streams, in which abyssal deepness sparkle myriads of interpretative glow. An in-discipline of collaboration deals with that oceanic infinitude; it attracts to the volcanic pores the sight of the divers, allows its telluric pulse to be printed on their retina, and allows the precious image to rise from that instant, witnessed by both divers in their ephemeral intensity, synthesizable in a thousand simultaneously distinct and coincident concepts.

Referências

• AGAMBEM, Giorgio. O que é um dispositivo? In: AGAMBEM, Giorgio. O que é contemporâneo? e outros ensaios. Chapecó: Editora Argos, 2009a. P. 25-54.
• AGAMBEM, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? In: AGAMBEM, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2009b. P. 1-24. 2009b.
• BERGSON, Henri. L'Énergie Spirituelle. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1990.
• DAMÁSIO, António. O Sentimento de Si: o corpo, a emoção e a neurobiologia da consciência. Lisboa: Publicações Europa-América, 1999.
• DELEUZE, Gilles. A Imagem-Movimento. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985.
• DELEUZE, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• DELEUZE, Gilles. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• DELEUZE, Gilles. Diferença e Repetição. São Paulo: Edições Graal, 2006.
• DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. O Que é a Filosofia? São Paulo: Editora 34, 1996.
• DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs - capitalismo e esquizofrenia, v. 4. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 1997.
• FERNANDES, Ciane. Dança-Teatro: fluxo, contraste, memória no glossário. Mimus - Revista Online de Mímica e Teatro Físico, Salvador, Padma Produções, ano 2, n. 4, p. 76-79, 2012. Disponível em: <Disponível em: www.mimus.com.br >. Acesso em: 27 mar. 2016.
  » www.mimus.com.br
• GIL, José. Movimento Total - o corpo e a dança. Lisboa: Relógio D'Água Editores, 2001.
• GILPIN, Heidi. Debate moderado por Scott LaHunta in Dance Dramaturgy: speculations and reflections. SARMA Laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation, Bruxelas, 2000. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://sarma.be/docs/2869 >. Acesso em: 23 jan. 2015.
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• HOGHE, Raimund. Entrevista com Bonnie Marranca in Dancing the sublime. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, v. 32, n. 2, p. 24-37, maio 2010.
• KASTRUP, Virginia. A Invenção de Si e do Mundo. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2007.
• KERKHOVEN, Marianne Van. Looking without pencil in the hand. SARMA Laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation, Bruxelas, 1994. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://sarma.be/docs/2858 >. Acesso em: 23 jan. 2015.
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• LEPECKI, André. Debate moderado por Scott LaHunta in Dance Dramaturgy: speculations and reflections. SARMA Laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation, Bruxelas, 2000. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://sarma.be/docs/2869 >. Acesso em: 23 jan. 2015.
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• VARGA, Bálint András. Conversations with Xenakis. Londres: Faber and Faber, 1996.

• This unpublished text, translated by Miguel Martins and proofread by Vanja Grujic and Ananyr Porto Fajardo, is also published in Portuguese in this issue.

• 1
  For Deleuze and Guattari (1997), becoming is what gathers those who are involved in a binary relation. Me and my musical compositions (my becoming as a musical composer), me and the dance (my becoming as a choreographer), me and the choreographer (my becoming as a collaborator), the collaboration and the work (the becoming of the work starting from collaboration). The becoming establishes an indiscernibility zone between one term and the other (between the one and the other), a neighborhood zone that distinguishes itself from the replacement of one term by the other or from the transformation of one in the other. It is on the bridge that dilutes the border between these terms that becoming moves itself: "A becoming is not a correspondence of relations. But it is neither a similarity, an imitation, nor, in last instance, a recognition" (Deleuze; Guattari, 1997, p. 18).

• 2
  For Deleuze and Guattari, "the feelings, as precepts, aren't perceptions that would refer forward to an object (reference): if they are similar to something, it's a similarity produced by their own means (1996, p. 216)". The sound waves that are similar to the come and go of the cello's bow, the physical effort that is similar to the levitation of the dancer, these are the forces that interlink their becoming along the intensity of the affections. Taking in account that affections are becoming, they are not confused with the work, but they belong to it by its own right; they are an indiscernible virtual force in their plan of composition.

• 3
  According to Deleuze, "[e]ach series tells a story: not different points of view on the same story, like the different points of view on the town we find in Leibniz, but completely distinct stories which unfold simultaneously. The basic series are divergent" (Deleuze, 1994, p. 123).

• 4
  Ianis Xenakis interviewed by Bálint Varga (Varga, 1996, p. 211).

• 5
  We must understand "government" as the remission to the concept of oikonomia, which in old Greek means "the administration of the oikos (the home) and, more generally, management" (Agambem, 2009b, p. 8). Settled by the medieval theory, this term is the root of the conceptual genealogy of Agambem's apparatus, referring a praxis in opposition to being.

• 6
  Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (1960) is a Belgium choreographer, mentor and director of the "Rosas" dance company.

• 7
  William Forsythe (1949) is a dancer and choreographer born in the United States known by his work with the Frankfurt's Ballet, and by the reorientation with which he had contributed in what the classical ballet is considered.

• 8
  Meg Stuart (1965) is a prominent choreographer born in the United States living and working in Europe.

• 9
  This article will not enter into the question of musical dramaturgy. It is closely related, since a long time ago, to the wide spectrum of musical theatre, and, in a very particular way, to the emergence of the opera, in which context music assumes a structuring function. From the baroque period onwards, the libretto is, simultaneously, a dramatic text and a matrix that orientates musical composition, insofar that musical composition in the opera is supported by the dramatic narrative of the libretto, in order to base the production of musical functionality, searching inside of the intrigue between the figures, in the temperature of the scenes and in the dynamic of the dialogues that are structuring matrixes of their allusive virtualities. In contrast to the dramaturgy of the dance, whose conceptualization arises from the relatively recent questionings about the linguistic primacy of the dramaturgy, the musical dramaturgy sends us to the very origins of theatre, and besides being a potentially relevant epistemological field, the implications that it offers have some redundant affinities with those that have been signalized during the approach to dramaturgy of dancing, in what has to do with the conceptualization of a dramaturgical apparatus, as the tool of the artistic collaboration between musical and chorographical compositions.

• 10
  It is important to precisely understand the meaning assigned to the expression autobiographic conscience. This expression comes from the approximation of the neurobiology to the studies of conscience. According to the neurologist António Damásio "both the past and the future in advance are felt simultaneously with here and now, in a comprehensive point of view whose scope is as vast as that of an epic story" (1999, p. 36). This chronological ubiquity is possible because of the intervention of the nuclear conscience (which furnishes to our organism a sense of yourself in a determined point of time and space), and of an 'autobiographic yourself", reliant on systematized memories (situations where nuclear conscience allowed the knowledge of the more invariant characteristics of the life of an organism). The genuine objects of the human experience place themselves in the autobiographic memory, classified in conceptual or linguistic terms, being recoverable by a memory or with knowledge. The autobiographic conscience constitutes, this way, one of the vehicles for identity production.

• 11
  The prefix in intends, on one hand, to refer the antonymous of discipline, in a way to distinguish itself from it, maintaining, nevertheless, a semantic implication with a virtual disciplinary field. On the other hand, the use of italic suggests the reading of this prefix in English language, proposing a conceptual relation of pertinence with the interior of a specific field of knowledge, which has been explored along this research, and to whose development some paths of escape remain open. In the designation of in-discipline is still present the current meaning of denial or standard transgression.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Apr 2017

History

• Received
  30 Mar 2016
• Accepted
  26 Aug 2016