Can the dancer "speak"?

"Hello, welcome to Retrospective. My name is [name of the dancer] and what you just saw is an
excerpt of Xavier Le Roy's [title of the chosen work] and it was also the beginning of my
retrospective for this exhibition." These are the first words the visitor hears after being
approached by the performers of Retrospective. Just like Vronique Doisneau in the eponymous
piece of Jrme Bel, in front of the audience at the Paris Opera, the dancer speaks and by
speaking she starts a process of subjectification, shifting the tradition of how the dancer has been
conceived in History.
In the following text I will explain the reasons that make Retrospective especially relevant for both
the dancer and the visitor. There are two topics that I will unfold in this text: the suggestion to
think of this exhibition as a technology to emancipate the dancer of his condition of subalternity,
and the consideration of the dancer's body as a living archive.
Let me clarify that by "speaking" I am not referring to the physical exercise of using the voice on
stage but rather the political exercise of having a voice or giving the voice to myself. To have a
voice is to have and perform my own discourse and therefore not be attached to the other in
order to articulate or defend my own practice and interest. The other, in this particular case, is the
choreographer, critic, theorist, teacher and/or audience. To have voice is, after all, to have the
capacity of agency to affirm myself as a political subject.
I therefore would like to ask you, the reader, to read "speaking" in these terms when it appears in
this text.
In 1988 Hindu philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published a crucial text for postcolonial
critique studies, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"1 In her text, Spivak makes a severe critique on the
ideas exposed by Foucault and Deleuze in their dialogue "Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir.
Entretien avec G. Deleuze"2, as well as an analysis of the subalternity of women, taking as a
reference point the sati3 ritual.
My intention here is not to discuss Spivak's text, but rather to appropriate her concept of
subalternity and transfer it to the contemporary arts. I would like to propose the hypothesis that
the subject of subalternity of the contemporary arts in general, and the performing arts in
particular, is the dancer. Dance is, and has been, underestimated and considered a minor art in
the History of the Arts. The dancer, very often objectified, has always been muted, placed apart
from discourse.
I have many reasons to make such affirmation: the lack of own discourse (academically
legitimated); the problematic of the educational process that excludes the possibility of expanding
the idea of the dancer-machine, a non-thinking body that executes orders, accentuating his
muteness; the conservative choreographic tradition that oppresses the interpreter; the muting
process by the theorists, academics and critics that have appropriated our voices to generate the
dance's legitimate body of text, helping to fetishize the dancer as an object of erotic and sexual
desire, a sculptural body shaped by movement.
I utter these affirmations acknowledging myself as a dancer that had to struggle during my
process of education and early professionalization to find the sources to develop my own
intellectual practice and discourse and also to be unashamed for lacking theoretical knowledge.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg "Marxism and Interpretation of
Culture", University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1988, p. 271.
2
Michel Foucault, Les intellectuels et le pouvoir. Entretien avec G. Deleuze, 1972, in Dits et crits, Gallimard, Pars, 1994, vol. II, p.
308.
3
In the sati ritual the Hindu widow should ascend to the dead husband's pyre to immolate herself.

During my dance education I was hardly encouraged to use my intellect to understand

movement, to think of dance as a language. In the four-year program I went through, we only had
two months of philosophy classes, the level of which was actually lower than what I had had in
my high school. We were supposed to move and sweat. Beckett's quote, "dance first, think after,
it's the natural order" was practiced literally, although the second action wasn't supported.
Manuel Asensi, in his introduction to the Spanish translation of Spivak's text, affirms that "the
possibility of speaking can't be taken for granted. And this is the reason why she [Spivak] utters
the question: can the subaltern "speak"?"4 He goes on to say that Spivak "lets us understand that
the subaltern is mute by definition, and thus it seems to reconstruct the subaltern not only as a
unified subject that cannot speak, but as a mute object, positioned outside of the field of
agency".5
A mute object, positioned outside of the field of agency, is precisely how the figure of the dancer
has been constructed historically, a subject without capacity of enunciation neither action, which
has been relegated to an object onto which are projected the bourgeois hetero-normative desires
and fantasies.
As a muted subject, the dancer requires a thinking process to emancipate himself. The
emancipation will come by acknowledging that dance, and movement, is already a discourse. If
dance is considered a minor art, then movement cannot be considered a legitimate language.
That is the struggle that the dancer has to face. Only when the dancer claims his right to "speak"
will he emancipate himself. To reiterate, I do not mean the dancer should stop moving in order to
start talking. By appropriating the right to "speak", also considering dance as a language, he
becomes a subject with political agency, with a capacity to decide the way he wants to participate
in society. But we cannot take this emancipating thinking process for granted, and this is the
reason why I use the concept of subalternity to ask the question: "Can the dancer "speak"?"
Let me provide a clear example in order to better understand what I mean by dance being a
language. When I dance, I am navigating through movement concepts that I choose, either
beforehand or while practicing. We cannot transfer the idea of language, being a sequence of
words, to dance. A movement does not equal a word. I move and by choosing a concept to move
I am developing a line of thought. I will be more specific: I choose to move from the bones, from
the joints, articulating the limbs, thinking the sequence of movements with a beginning and an
end, organizing those movements into the three planes of action (horizontal, lateral and sagital).
The result of this practice is a "text".
The relevance of Retrospective, in the terms that I am analyzing it in this text, is given by the
gesture that Le Roy makes by creating a technology that amplifies the voice of the dancer. Le
Roy does not use the dancers in order to reproduce his work, which would imply a conventional
retrospective and an objectification of the dancer; he does the opposite, he uses his work so the
dancers can make their own retrospective, and therefore gives them the voices that have
previously been silenced.
This shift is very important, not only on an artistic level but also, and specially, on a discursive
level. Le Roy uses his name and work -recognized and acclaimed internationally- in order to
affirm and legitimize that the dancer has his own discourse.
I would like to concentrate on the fact that the display that Xavier Le Roy puts together operates
as an emancipatory technology of the dancer. Retrospective is a mechanism that gives voice to
the dancer, subjectifying rather than objectifying him. To give voice, or even better to appropriate

My own translation from: "...la posibilidad de hablar no hay que darla por sentado. Y esa es la razn que le lleva a hacer la pregunta:
pueden hablar los subalternos?" Manuel Asensi Prez, "La subalternidad borrosa" in the Spanish translation of: Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Pueden hablar los subalernos?, Traduccin y edicin crtica de Manuel Asensi Prez, MACBA, Barcelona, 2009, p. 14.
5
My own translation from: "est dando a entender que el subalterno es mudo por definicin, y con ello parece reconstruir el
subalterno no solo como un sujeto unificado que no puede hablar, sino como un objeto mudo, posicionado al margen de la agencia".
Ibid, p. 25.

one's own voice, let me insist, is the first political action in order to have agency, and therefore to
be a subject and be able to take part in society.
Therefore Retrospective is an exhibition with subjects that talk to other subjects, dancers that talk
to visitors and visitors that talk to dancers. Yes, here also, the visitor has the right to speak, can
dialogue with the dancer, and ask him questions. Like in Low Pieces, another piece by Le Roy
made in 2011, where the audience can converse with the dancers for fifteen minutes at the
beginning and end of the piece, in Retrospective these conventions are also broken. This
proximity, rather uncanny at first, becomes essential to construct the dialogue that relation
requires. We, the dancers, speak to the visitors, and by so doing we are not only emancipating
ourselves, but also emancipating the visitor.
The visitor could be considered another subject that the museum, as a disciplinary institution, has
muted over the years in its attempt to educate the behavioral rules that a visitor must have. As
Lus Miguel Flix puts it: "The growing publicness of the museum, an outcome of what were the
new liberal ideals that refashioned this space around the utopia of public space accessible to all
layers of the population, potentiated the mixture of classes under one same roof. Behind this
apparent democratic ideology, was the principle that, by visiting the museum, the masses could
not only enlarge their cognitive horizons but also adopt, by mimicking, the correct modes of
behavior performed by the elites. The museum, a place to see but also to be seen, became,
alongside other institutions, a disciplinary agent that seeks to regulate behaviors and disseminate
new norms of conduct."6
We thus see how Retrospective becomes a new paradigm. In the exhibition space visitors can
move freely, talk to the artists that are working, clarify their doubts, become curious about our
stories, sit down (even lay down) if they are tired, or practice a movement concept if they are
proposed to do so. The visitor is not only observing bodies, instead of objects that move, but he
has the opportunity to become aware of his own body, its weight, and its conditions.
Why this paradigm is becoming so trendy nowadays in the international scene of visual arts might
be a topic of another discussion, but nonetheless it is relevant to consider.
After high school I went to university to study Art History. I combined my studies with working
professionally as a tap dancer. After a year in university I decided to quit Art History and enter
into a professional dance program to become a contemporary dancer. I convinced myself, after
obtaining a copy of Cairon - a journal of dance studies - that even if I committed myself to dance I
could still develop myself intellectually, having discovered that there was a field of theory around
my new profession. I even used this argument to convince my parents that dancing was not for
dummies, that I was not being lazy by leaving the university.

Retrospective, like a genealogy, searches for the details and anecdotes of the dancer's history
that interweave with the solo works of Xavier Le Roy. As Foucault affirms, "genealogy, as an
analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to
expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body."7
A body imprinted by history is precisely the one that we unfold during the exhibition in our selfretrospectives. Here, the dancer's body can be thought of as a corporeal archive or somathque8.

Stated by Luis Miguel Flix in a private e-mail exchange.

Michel Foucault, "Nietzche, Genealogy, History" in "The Foucault Reader", ed. Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Book - Random House,
New York, 1984, p. 83.
8
Somathque or somateca (in Spanish) is a concept by philosohper and activist Beatriz Preciado. The translation in English would
loose the root "thque" that means collection, assembly, archive. In Preciado's words, a proper English translation of this concept
would be "a techno-living archive" in order to "take into account the constitutive relationship of the living being with the history of
technology and of semiotization systems." Quoted from: After Organicism: Gironcolis Techno-Somatic Fictions, in the catalogue for
the exhibition Gironcoli: Context edited by Bettina M. Busse and Agnes Husslein-Arco, Belvedere, Vienna, 2013.
7

This "techno-living archive" stores movements, choreographies, sensations, patterns and

memories in its body, in the flesh. Thinking of Yvonne Rainer's statement, we could not only
affirm that "the mind is a muscle"9, but also that the muscle is a mind, a mind that archives all this
information and that is always ready to brush the dust away and activate it anew. Mind and
muscle, memory and flesh, sensations and patterns, are all within the dancing body, a body
trained to handle this data, this text, this discourse. If that is so, what the visitor is witnessing in
the exhibition space is nothing else but the dancer affirming: "my body is my thesis"10 and dance
is my own discourse, a sweaty discourse.
But how is this archive organized, under which criteria? How can we access the information that
this somathque stores? That is the technology that Xavier Le Roy puts in motion, using his
works as an excuse, or common denominator, among all the retrospectives that are being
created around the world.
When I perform my retrospective, I am opening my archive. What is unique about this archive is
that facts show no hierarchy between them. All facts that are archived have the potential to
become important when unfolding my retrospective. Therefore the fact that I fell asleep the first
time I saw Giszelle, a work by Le Roy in collaboration with Eszther Salamon made in 2001, has
equal relevance as the moment I decided to become a professional dancer or that I started
dancing as a kid in my living room to Flashdance...What a Feeling.
I still remember taking advantage of the moments I was alone at home, closing the curtains so
my neighbors couldn't see me, placing the Flashdance LP on the pick-up and getting crazy in my
living room, dancing, turning, falling... That was a free dance, free of the codes I would learn
years later in my dance education. These memories also get mixed up with me practicing
pirouettes in my bedroom after my first ballet classes. Just like Billy Elliot in his bedroom, I
attempted over and over to turn in the tiny space between my bed, my table and my closet - what
a virtuosic exercise. It had to be in my bedroom or alone in the house, it was a private practice
that I could not share, since I was not sure it was ok for a boy to enjoy dancing. After my pirouette
practice I would go out to the terrace to practice basketball or football with my brother, which was
a public practice.
The storyline that each retrospective creates does not follow any common logic; each of them is
constructed according to personal needs, desires or inner logics, just like the images of art
historian Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne, organized in plates because they share a certain
aesthetic or form and not because they come from the same chronological time, proposing
another narrativity far from the hegemonic one. Here the facts, choreographies, stories, are
organized on a horizontal manner, tracing a historiographical path, but perhaps not a
chronological one. Facts, images, movements, memories dialogue with each other and with
certain aspects of Le Roy's works, but there is no hegemonic narrative or linear time that should
be followed. This openness offers a myriad perspectives and captures the visitor that wants to
read more texts of this archive, an archive of techno-living archives, that is not a unique, closed
and hermetic one but instead is an ever expanding, porous and heterogenic one. In a way, the
visitor is offered a variety of approaches to experience time.
Not only can the dancer's archive be read or unfolded in many ways, the exhibition is also always
working with different performers wherever it takes place. Retrospective thus becomes an
expanding archive of the voice of the dancer that keeps on growing every time it is set up in a
new city, working with local agents whose archives will enter into dialogue with the previous ones.
Retrospective is thus, as opposed to any conventional retrospective, a multi-voiced or cacophonic
archive about the coming into being of a dancer.
"What is important is not only the property but to understand that a museum is a kind of archive of
the common to which each of us contributes with our own story, our forms of classification. This is

The Mind Is A Muscle, dance program by Yvonne Rainer, New York City, 1968.
Aimar Prez Gal, "The Pandora Project: Concert #1", Amsterdam, 2009.

10

a network."11 Similar to this proposal of the museum given by the Director of Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Manuel Borja-Villel, in Retrospective, all the retrospectives
that form this expansive archive can also be seen as parts of a network, where the nodes of
common information are the solo works of Le Roy. This global network, however, acts locally,
with local agents that speak the local language, inserting the discourse into the city where it is
being produced.
Dancing in the studio I often catch myself doing movements that belong to my archive,
movements learned from teachers I had, choreographers I have worked with or choreographies I
have danced. My body, as a somathque, archives many bodies that have passed through mine.
Dancing feels like navigating through all these bodies. It reminds me of the loop of Giszelle that I
liked so much to do in Retrospective, where I would pass through icons like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever, Jesus Christ or a gorilla; not really representing each icon but rather
shifting from one body to another. Dance happens between one and the other, shifting positions,
concepts, images, bodies or shapes; dancing makes me feel like I am navigating in this
continuous transition.

Aimar Prez Gal

Barcelona, September 2013

11

My own translation from: Manuel Borja-Villel interviewed by Carmen Prez-Lanzac in El Pas, Madrid, September 16th 2013.
http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/12/eps/1379005507_267378.html