From

repetition to rhythm

Why Bergson and dance? You dont have to be an expert on Bergson or on
modern dance, to immediately notice the similarities between these two
domains. Bergson writes about time, movement, consciousness, conscious
movement, which is basically how a lot of people would describe modern dance.
At first glance, there seem to be a lot of parallels between both domains. This is
why I was surprised to find out that the literature on the relation between
Bergson and modern dance is rather limited.
In the next 15 minutes, I will try to convince you that this comparison is actually
worth making and that there is more to it then some general parallels.
To avoid exceeding the time limit I will only discuss this relation from one
particular angle, using the idea of repetition. Im hoping, however, that trough
the notion of repetition it will become clear that Bergsons philosophy as a whole
is at stake here and that repetition is only one of the many points where Bergson
and modern dance meet. If I manage to get my point across, you should even be
convinced at the end of my presentation that modern dance has the potential to
play a role in Bergsons philosophical project, which the French philosopher
Pierre Hadot describes as the transformation of perception.

What is repetition according to Bergson?

Ill start off with a brief introduction to the metaphysics of Bergson. Bergson is a
dualistic thinker, which makes things a lot easier for us.
In Creative evolution, Bergson describes reality as being composed of two
opposite tendencies. Matter and life. Matter is the tendency to keep repeating the
past whereas life is a continuous creation or a duration. So you have matter as
repetition and life as creation.
However, these two tendencies are not equally original, life is more original than
matter and matter is only a deviation of life. Matter appears when the original
force of life looses strength and ends up interrupting the original flow of life.
However, matter in reality will always stay a tendency that tends towards pure
materiality. It will never reach the limit where it becomes pure matter, since it

can never completely close itself of from the original flow of life as a whole. This
explains why matter always has duration, be it in a very limited way. To use
Bergsons famous example: when I want to dissolve some sugar in a glass of
water, I have to wait for it to dissolve. I cannot speed up the process, because the
glass of water is not a closed system that I can manipulate without taking in
account its relation to reality as a whole.
In daily life, our intelligence does isolate the glass of water and abstracts it from
the duration of reality by reducing it to this ideal limit of pure materiality.
Natural perception and science, which are both determined by intelligence,
consider reality only in its material dimension, which is the tendency to repeat
the past. We only see what repeats itself and reduce reality to this repetition by
depriving it of its duration.

I quote Bergson from creative evolution: Elle (lintelligence) isole donc,
instinctivement, dans une situation, ce qui ressemble au dj connu; elle cherche le
mme()
For Bergson, pure repetition is an abstraction or a simplification that reduces
reality to its material dimension and ignores the creative force that underlies this
material dimension.
Why does our intelligence do this? Because it is determined by utility and
practical necessity. Our consciousness is selective and its criteria are practical.
Only what repeats itself is of practical interest, since it is predictable. I can only
measure the impact of my action on the dimension of reality that tends toward
regularity and stability, which is why I filter out that which is singular, and
irreducibly new. Life is unpredictable; therefore I cancel it out, since I dont know
how it will react to my actions anyway.
The result is that my intelligence is only conscious of the present insofar as it
repeats the past. Science, but also our natural perception, transforms the
continuous and creative movement of reality into a mechanistic simplification.
Luckily it is possible to reverse this transformation.

Reversing the natural tendency of intelligence.

Not all hope is lost. Bergson believes in the possibility to reveal the irreducible
creativity that is blocked out by our intelligence, by reversing the mechanisation
of reality. And who else but the philosopher capable of doing this? Il faut, pour se
reprsenter cette irrductibilit et cette irrversibilit, remonter la pente naturelle
de lintelligence. Mais la est prcisment le rle du philosophe.
The philosopher can develop a method that enables us to see things in their
duration. Bergson calls this method intuition.
However, we dont have to put all of our hopes on the philosopher only (thank
god). There is someone else who is able to reverse the mechanistic view of
reality: the artist.
Le mcanisme ne voit de la ralit que laspect similitude ou rptition, lartiste, au
contraire, a une croyance latente dans la spontanit de la nature.
In le rire, Bergson says that the highest ambition of art is to reveal nature to us.
Nature for Bergson is the creative evolution of everything that is. It is the
constantly changing flow of reality. In other words, nature is that which we do
not see in natural perception, or at least, that which we only see in an abstract
and simplified way. When Bergson says that art reveals nature to us, he means
that art can make us look trough these mechanistic abstractions we are
constantly performing on nature out of practical necessity. Lart na dautre objet
que dcartes des symboles pratiquement utiles, les gnralites conventionellement
et socialement accepte, enfin, tout ce qui nous masque la ralit, pour nous metre
face face avec la ralit mme. Art can reverse the course of our intelligence
and transform our perception in order for us to see the individual duration of
things.
Bergson gives some examples of how different artforms perform this
transformation of perception. From these different artforms, music is the most
effective since it has time as a constitutive element. In his enumeration, he does
not speak about dance, which I think is quiet strange since dance not only deals
with time but also with movement and with the moving body. One would think
that this would increase its potential to transform our perception.

Dance and the transformation of perception.

How can dance perform this transformation of perception that brings into
consciousness the individuality of things? One way would be to create a dance
piece that resists any possible abstraction or generalisation.
This is what Rainer did with A Trio, which is choreography that simply does not
allow consciousness to find similarities or even to divide the choreography into
smaller constitutive movements. She wanted to create a dance that had no
discontinuity or repetition at all, so that it became impossible to tell where one
movement ends and another one begins. She describes her choreography as one
long transition. When you look at it you cannot isolate or generalise a single
movement from the choreography as a whole. Since our intelligence is unable to
abstract anything from it, we are forced to watch the dance in its individual
duration.
Around the same time, the choreographer Trisha Brown was doing similar
experiments with the dancing body. Trough improvisation, she wanted to create
a dance that was pure creation and unpredictability. But she was disappointed
by the result. When she watched herself dancing on tape she did not see the
explosive unpredictable flow she was aiming for. From this frustration emerged
the idea to do the complete opposite, to create a dance that has a rigorous
repetitive structure and that turns the body into what she called a dancing
machine. Paradoxically, it is in this mechanical dance that she found the
irreducible unpredictability she was looking for while improvising.
Accumulation is one of these pieces where she forces the human body into a
mechanical structure. Strangely enough, it is within this mechanical movement
that the irreducible, the unrepeatable and the unpredictable are revealed.
As you can see, de dance is composed of repetitive movements. She starts the
same phrase over and over again always adding one movement. However, the
new is not in the movements she gradually adds, but in the movements she
repeats.

Ramsay Burt, an American dance scholar, writes about an interview Brown once
gave.

while she tried to make the movement in Accumulation the same each time, she
knew it never was: Sometimes I go a bit faster, sometimes I slow down and those
changes I dont consciously make. It happens

Browns execution, therefore, always exceeded the systematically formal shape of
the choreography. Traces of her embodied experience emerged as an
excess or supplement that Brown recognized as this marvellous thing
called dance


Brown found difference within repetition. What the mechanical structure
showed was not that the human body is a Cartesian machine. Rather, by its
rigorous mechanical form, the execution of the choreography showed that there
is always something that falls out of this mechanical structure and that cannot be
reduced to it. This impossibility to perfectly repeat a movement is embedded in
the creative nature of time..
For Brown, this very inability to perfectly repeat a movement is what dance is
about. This marvellous thing called dance is the excess that appears in an
attempt to perfectly repeat a movement, as that which does not dissolve in the
mechanistic simplification of reality. For Brown, dance is not the choreographic
structure, but the execution of this choreography itself in which the duration of
every movement is revealed in its individuality.
Browns choreography is in a certain way more effective then Rainers dance.
Where Rainer tries to construct continuity or duration, Brown reveals continuity
within discontinuity. Browns dance comes closer to Bergsons definition of art in
the sense that it actually enables us to reverse the natural tendency of
intelligence, which is to reduce reality to materiality. By showing us that even in
the most rigorous repetition, there will always be an irreducible excess, she
makes clear that materiality is only a tendency in reality that tends towards pure
repetition, but that it will never reach this ideal limit of pure repetition because
it can never be isolated from the duration of reality as a whole.