Julie Favreau: Choreographic Performance

From Dance to Performance

When one thinks of the relationship between dance and the visual arts, the figures of Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, and Trisha Brown immediately come to mind. The standard bearers of postmodern American dance, these choreographers created works that were in some ways reminiscent of Kaprow’s “happenings,” during an effervescent period in the 1950s and 1960s when the visual and performing arts intersected around the hybrid, hard-to-define notion of performance. Although artists, dancers, and choreographers shared the similarly vague yet persistent intention of bringing art and life together from the early twentieth century on, they had each arrived at this stage of their creative thinking from very different places, and this had a decisive influence on the way they used “performance” to critique the boundaries of their respective disciplines. Laurent Goumarre’s characterization of performance seems particularly apt in this regard: “Whatever forms it has taken, performance has, throughout its history, periodically returned in order to point to an aesthetic and political crisis.”1 1  - Laurent Goumarre, “Tu n’as rien vu à Fontenay-aux-Roses,” Art Press 2, no. 7 (Nov. – Jan., 2008): 90 (Own translation). This statement concurs with that of RoseLee Goldberg, a well-known historian of performance art, who insists on its subversive or even provocative function inasmuch as it often emerges in reaction to an oppressive milieu and aims to surpass the limits of more established art forms.2 2  - RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 13.

For dance, this involved rejecting anything even remotely associated with representation. By refusing to submit to the dictates of narrative or emotion, by denying the illusion of facility and beauty created by technical virtuosity, and by trying to rethink the context in which works were to be presented, these choreographers and dancers wanted to make their mark beyond the codes of classical ballet. The work of redefining dance had already begun in the 1920s and 1930s by choreographers like Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, who believed that the purpose of dance was to inform audiences and spark reflection by addressing contemporary concerns, rather than simply seeking to entertain. This goal of bringing art and life closer together, which was initially conveyed through the content of the works, was much more evident in the form of choreographies starting in the 1950s, where daily gestures such as walking, breathing, and ­standing upright — gestures characterized as “found” à la Duchamp³ 3 - Susan Au, Ballet and Modern Dance (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 161. — became the building blocks of increasingly abstract choreographies. This position was radicalized with the trend of postmodern American dance, which in eschewing all forms of expression in movement, ironically came much closer to the theories of modernism and art for art’s sake in the visual arts, focusing the entire dance experience on a study of form.⁴ 4 - Sally Banes, “Introduction to the Wesleyan Paperback Edition,” in Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), xiv-xv. Thus, by distancing itself from everything related to representation, dance seemed to be moving closer to the visual arts. Yet to probe the connections between dance and performance in Julie Favreau’s work, it would seem more appropriate to think in opposite terms. While the choreographic gesture is the starting point for all of her work, she is interested in movement as much for its expressive potential as for its visual quality.