So how does Divisor<\/em>\u2019s performative biopolitics\u200a\u2014\u200awhich in 1968 bound together individuals from different socio-economic back\u00adgrounds\u200a\u2014\u200alend itself to a contemporary context? In the 1960s and 1970s, performance art became synonymous with liberal democratic ideals. Its dematerialization of the art object and the challenges that it posed to the conventions of traditional forms of visual art were aligned with the rise of feminism, anti-war activism, and attention to the separations between the personal and the political. During the time that the military regime ruled Brazil, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Brazilian performance art (by Martha Ara\u00fajo, Antonio Manuel, and Let\u00edcia Parente) emerged as an ephemeral yet potent means to express political dissent while escaping state censorship. Keeping this context and the disputable tenet that performance art is a truly<\/em> avant-garde genre in mind, does Divisor<\/em>\u2019s reperformance continue to produce what Pape referred to as \u201cmagnetized space\u201d: a force (or situation) that attracts individuals for a certain moment into a larger sociability and then dissolves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Documentation of the original performance reveals its potential as an expression of collective social movement. The images show a large white textile surface, approximately thirty square metres, spread across a street in Rio de Janeiro, with the heads of smiling children and adults emerging from various openings cut into the fabric. The large woven piece becomes a living membrane, activated by moving bodies. Negotiating a restricted yet unified walk through the city, the performers fold and crease the surface, reflecting their relationships with each other in movement. Divisor<\/em> powerfully transforms space by gesturing toward a collective politics that was inaccessible to its participants during the repressive military dictatorship. As dance scholar Andr\u00e9 Lepecki suggests, the figure of the dancer in contemporary society might be understood as a political actor capable of attaining states of freedom<\/em>: \u201cChoreography as a planned, dissensual, and nonpoliced disposition of motions and bodies becomes the condition of possibility for the political to emerge.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Andr\u00e9 Lepecki, \u201cChoreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the Task of the Dancer,\u201d TDR: The Drama Review<\/em> 51, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 22.<\/span> Reminding us of the continuous commitment that the movement toward freedom in the adjectival \u201cpolitical\u201d demands, Lepecki provides a way to think of Divisor<\/em>, in its choreographed collective movement,as a bodily experience aimed at redefining public spaces. Pape\u2019s apparatus provides a framework for challenging the regularity of everyday city space as it becomes overdetermined (and predetermined) by \u201csocieties of control,\u201d\u200a4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - See Gilles Deleuze, \u201cPostscript on the Societies of Control,\u201d October<\/em> 59 (Winter 1992): 3\u200a\u2014\u200a7.<\/span> while also proposing a platform for principles of collective identity and sociability to manifest themselves. Social equality is not only a metaphor in Divisor<\/em>, but also a kinesthetically activated force in the bodies of participants, who become co-dependent in negotiating a shared trajectory of their city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2013, the Hong Kong non-profit space Para Site looked to re-create the embodied experience of Divisor<\/em> by staging a reperformance of the work for an exhibition. Critic Stephanie Bailey described the event with awe: \u201cThe staging of Lygia Pape\u2019s 1968 performance Divisor<\/em> on the streets of Hong Kong was a fantasy I never knew I had, but witnessing it was a dream nonetheless.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Stephanie Bailey, \u201cIntertextual Healing: Lygia Pape\u2019s \u2018Divisor\u2019 Restaged for the First Time in Asia,\u201d Hyperallergic<\/em> (May 21, 2013), <bit.ly\/2zkgbBE>.<\/span> Bailey\u2019s feeling of surprise at viewing the piece as it unfolded in Hong Kong suggests its continued experiential impact. Regardless of her previous knowledge of the work as document, the live<\/em> experience of it on the streets struck her. This is partly attributable to the piece\u2019s relevancein Hong Kong in 2013, as the city was still recovering from the SARS epidemic. Channelled into another context, Divisor <\/em>comes to symbolize the contemporary effects of colonialism, segregation, sterilization, and the politics of plagues, contagion, and fear. Divisor<\/em>, as an event that carries forth its initial movement while being redefined in reperformance, demonstrates how embodied practices citing the past can cross over stylistic, geographic, and historical boundaries. In Hong Kong, its reinvention remains anchored in the initial premise, with reperformance acting as a democratizing tool\u200a\u2014\u200athe experiential knowledge it embodies and makes accessible allows us to reflect on its socio-political past as well as its present relevance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n If we are to roughly define Divisor<\/em> as a performance in which the outcomes are dependent on what its participants do, with no single force controlling its overall motion\u200a\u2014\u200amuch like the workings of an ideal<\/em> democracy\u200a\u2014\u200athen the flexibility of its movement, the agency provided to its participants to move freely<\/em>, is one of its principal tenets. The curatorial statement for the piece\u2019s 2013 iteration at Para Site looked to highlight these social qualities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The struggle for both the individuality and the collectivity one experiences in Divisor<\/em> made us think of the boundaries we as humans construct amongst each other. During times of plague\u200a\u2014\u200aphysiological or cultural (social pests)\u200a\u2014\u200apeople become arrested in their own bodies. Contact, touch, being with others could result in contamination. [\u2026] Hong Kong is a megalopolis that needed a Lygia Pape, strolling in the heart of its downtown. Divisor<\/em> temporarily integrated the multi-layered and diverse society of this city.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Co-curator Inti Guerrero, quoted in ibid.<\/span>As it had in 1968, when Pape brought children from favelas into physical contact with middle-class individuals, Divisor <\/em>produced in Hong Kong an opportunity for unity and physical proximity in what had become a socially fractured populace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But contemporary performance, increasingly in vogue, is not without its questionable negotiations of collective experiences, especially as they relate to the 1960s and 1970s avant-gardes.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Not only, to quote Richard Schechner, have circumstances changed, as \u201caudiences are different, [and] memory itself deprives the reperformance of its shock of the new,\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Richard Schechner, \u201cThe Conservative Avant-Garde,\u201d New Literary History<\/em> 57, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 910.<\/span> but homogenized corporate culture has transformed the conditions under which these works are reproduced. On the Para Site website, a disclaimer following the announcement for the Divisor <\/em>event stated that the content of the program did not reflect the views of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (GovHK).8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - http:\/\/www.para-site.org.hk\/en\/programmes\/lygia-pape-divisor.<\/span> The organization\u2019s concern for separating the piece from the GovHK is related to the financial support that it receives from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, a statutory body tasked with broad-based development of the arts and a cultural gateway for institutions seeking public arts funding. The statement conveys a shift in the initial intent of the piece. But Divisor <\/em>cannot be disassociated from Pape\u2019s opposition to Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship and her taking part in citywide protests, including the March of the One Hundred Thousand on June 26, 1968, in Rio de Janeiro. Although Para Site\u2019s version of Divisor<\/em> bears political undertones, the distancing of the work from funders points to the difficulty of maintaining critical positions vis-\u00e0-vis cultural power brokers. One year later, as Hong Kong became the focus of the world with the Umbrella Revolution, student-led protests demonstrated the efficacy of political mobilization involving bodies interrelating in public spaces through the creative use of an object\u200a\u2014\u200ain this case, an umbrella. The proliferation of umbrellas in protest, although not a performance art event per se, reverberates with Pape\u2019s work, in which she subversively adopted socially conscious gestures of dissent under dictatorship. The white sheet, replaced by groupings of umbrellas, formed an apparatus to denounce the overreach of the Standing Committee for the National People\u2019s Congress in Hong Kong\u2019s electoral system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In New York City the Met Breuer\u2019s decision to collaborate with the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) for the 2017 reperformance of Divisor<\/em> also shifted Pape\u2019s initial impetus. Organizations such as the Madison Avenue BID, ubiquitous in New York City, take great care to represent urban life as \u201ccivilized\u201d in a post-industrial economic landscape. Encouraging docility within public environments, they secure \u201cdiscretely manicured spaces\u201d as \u201cplaygrounds for adult consumers who have internalized norms of proper behavior and keep watch over others to make sure they conform to the rules.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places <\/em>(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 143.<\/span> Madison Avenue BID holds disturbances to a minimum while maximizing the experience of their patrons. As they state on their website: \u201cMadison Avenue exhibits timeless elegance with a contemporary flavor that is distinctively New York. This boulevard of understated charm is sure to entice your senses with indulgences from all corners of the globe.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - http:\/\/madisonavenuebid.org\/.<\/span> With sponsorship from an Upper East Side organization that prides itself on the tidy packaging of globalized culture, Pape\u2019s initial ambition to make the activation of space into a political metaphor is put in jeopardy. Although the work still unsettles the everyday, Madison Avenue BID\u2019s oversight predetermines its outcome. This is made all the more blatant by the Met Breuer\u2019s insistence on a preselected trajectory for the event and that it only be performed once.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Eventbrite page no longer available.<\/span> The greater social potential within the performance first proposed by Pape becomes an aesthetic and experiential exercise, devoid of its original political impulses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although it is important to remain skeptical of those who are quick to categorize reperformance as gimmicky, we must recognize the difficulties in reactivating the \u201cavant-garde\u201d in today\u2019s complex cultural, social, and political contexts. Whereas performance art, in its first iterations, espoused an ethos of experimentation and spontaneity, the present wave of reperformances being presented in significant cultural venues are often de-politicized and fixed by institutional boundaries, economic ambitions, and optics. In displaying a wall-sized black-and-white photograph of Pape\u2019s 1968 Divisor<\/em> at the entrance to its exhibition, the Met Breuer announced a politics that it could not reproduce\u200a\u2014\u200aand perhaps this is why it dropped any mention of the reperformance\u2019s social undertones when announcing it on its website: \u201cThis staging of the seminal work, will revisit Pape\u2019s embrace of experimentation, process, contingency, experience, and desire to break down the space between the art and the viewer.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - http:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/press\/exhibitions\/2016\/lygia-pape.<\/span> Without explicitly revisiting Pape\u2019s \u201cpolitics,\u201d the re-enactment lends itself to spectacle\u200a\u2014\u200ato the pursuit of participation for participation\u2019s sake. As Divisor <\/em>continues to live, it shifts with every new context, tugging and pulling at Pape\u2019s initial critical desire to embody a larger sociality, to walk together. <\/p>\n![\"Divisor_Lygia_Pape_01\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO06_Morelli_Divisor_Lygia_Pape_01-1-scaled.jpg\")
Divisor (Divider)<\/em>, 1968, performance, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1990.
Photo: Paula Pape, \u00a9 Projeto Lydia Pape<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lygia](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO06_Morelli_Lygia-Pape_Divisor_02-1-scaled.jpg\")
Divisor<\/em>, 1968, performance, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of Para Site, Hong Kong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lygia](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO06_Morelli_Lygia-Pape_Divisor_04-1-scaled.jpg\")
Divisor<\/em>, 1968, performance, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2013.
Photo: courtesy of Para Site, Hong Kong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n