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Do We Only Remember What Has Been There?: Produits
d’autres circonstances by Xavier Leroy
Catherine Girardin
Abstract
This paper shows how Produits d’autres circonstances (2009) explores the relation
between the meaning granted to images, more particularly, the images related to
the dance practice of Butoh, and their embodiment in recognized Butoh dancers as
well as in “non-trained” bodies. It elaborates on the idea that Xavier Leroy uses
choreography and performance for their potential of transformation in order to
question the role of memory (be it human or virtual, like the Internet) in the
immutability of images. A come-and-go between engagement in and
disengagement from the product of his creation on the part of Leroy gives an ironic
character to the performance in order to shed a light on the process through which
Butoh images are managed and projected within different media. This paper
suggests that in Produits d’autres circonstances, these media (for instance, words,
audiovisual screenings, dance and spoken text) contradict one another and
collaborate at the same time in the creation of what Butoh is. More precisely, they
show how the circulation of images of Butoh can act upon the latter’s possible
definitions. As such, Produits d’autres circonstances is built as a self-reflexive
comment on Butoh and its position in the history of dance and suggests a new
perspective on authenticity which disassociates the latter from fixity and the
practice of comparison. By prioritizing process over form, and concept over
achievement, Leroy’s minimalist staging puts the emphasis on a type of knowledge
that comes out of “displacement” (Jean-Luc Nancy) and continuity. In Produits
d’autres circonstances, images are conceived as having a life like that which
animates the dancing body, where one is brought to develop a sensibility toward
contextual and “contingencial” meaning.
Key Words: Narrative, minimalism, body practice, tradition, contemporary art,
memory, media, imagination, spectatorship, creation process.
*****
“When everything can be seen, there’s nothing worth seeing.” 1
“I was carried away by the flux of colours that was floating around me, and neither
the essence of things, neither the interior of my memory, stood as my faithful
companion. […] The feeling of certainty about my body (yes, it is really me) was
taken from me.” 2
2
Do We Only Remember What Has Been There?: Produits d’autres
circonstances by Xavier Leroy
__________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction: Leroy and finity
Self-Unfinished (1998) by Xavier Leroy offers a perturbing image of the human
body. When seeing Leroy’s poses and contortions, the body structure as it is
usually felt vanishes at the profit of a series of indefinable forms, some black stains
on a white canvas, in which one can sometimes vaguely guess the shapes and
movements of an arm, a torso, a neck. This transformation of a living body
reminds of the notion of metamorphosis, the latter which can be read from both the
perspective of biology,3 where it is defined as “a change of physical form or
structure”,4 as well as dance: what does one expect from a dance performance other
than seeing bodies in continuous transformation for a certain duration of time?
The main object of this study is another performance of Leroy entitled Produits
d’autres circonstances (2009),5 a “performance-lecture” in which he narrates the
creation process of a doomed-to-fail challenge he was faced with, that of becoming
a Butoh dancer in two hours, out of which he made the performance Xavier fait du
rebutoh (2009).6 A parallel can be traced between Leroy’s interest for the process
of becoming and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s idea of the performance as a
“transformative space” because the spectators, “rather than addressing the possible
meanings […] implied, […] wonder[…] why and how they react[…].”7 In
Produits,8 Leroy inhabits an empty stage with his sole laptop. Devoid of any
pretention of spectacle, he tells the audience of the souvenirs of his contact with
Butoh in the form of a friendly conversation, shows videos and books from which
he tried to learn the basics and executes his own Butoh “piece” as well as those of
other dancers, like Tatsumi Hijikata or Kazuo Ohno. Whereas in Self-Unfinished
the images of the body itself (its plasticity, its boundaries) are reconfigured, in
Produits, the images of the practice of Butoh, including that of the bodies it
implies, go through a metamorphosis. In link with Fischer-Lichte’s theory, I would
even suggest that, following Boyan Manchev’s understanding of metamorphosis,
the latter which he sees as
a paradoxical figure, a figure of the transgression or the
suspension of the figure itself, […] the figure of a shaping and
transformational force going beyond the limits of the fixed
form,9
Leroy has developed a choreographic practice10 that tends to avoid fixity and,
by that, puts into question the idea that process necessarily amounts, or rather has
to amount, to a “form”. In order to analyse this, I will start by inquiring the degree
to which this scheme of the process resuming into form is implemented in our way
of thinking artistic creation and image in general, by taking Butoh as my main
example.
2. What is said to be fixed is not necessarily so
Catherine Girardin
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Even though Butoh is said to have been born in reaction to the Japanese
traditional arts of Noh and Kabuki, it can be seen as having its own tradition, and is
often associated with the obligatory step of the master/apprentice relationship.
However, Leroy explains in his performance that every dancer is free to develop
his or her own Butoh, he himself refuses to be almost naked on stage, painted with
white make-up, drawing agonizingly slow movements, like it would be expected
from a Butoh dancer. He values his own experience more than the “respect” toward
a scholarly defined aesthetics of Butoh and tends to reflect Hijikata’s words on
teaching: “I do not believe in any method of training or mastery of movements”.11
As Leroy tells the audience of what his preparation consisted in for his challenge,
he projects a video he had seen of Hijikata’s wife speaking of Butoh, which is
subtitled in English. She says that Hijikata, being raised in a harsh winter climate
on a farm in the north of Japan, had developed a certain type of bent body that
became “the” Butoh body. Leroy explains that a Japanese spectator who had
assisted to his performance told him afterwards that, in reality, the woman in the
video was simply saying that to dance Butoh is to “dance like dead people trying to
stand up”.12 In brief, because of this situation of (mis-)translation, Butoh, at first
associated with local geo-climactic and cultural marks, becomes an artistic and
poetry matter, thus putting into question “Japaneseness” in the development of a
Butoh poetics.
It is important to nuance Butoh’s anti-traditionalist origin by observing more
closely the different phases of its history. Butoh does not build itself in complete
contradiction to Japanese traditions, but turns toward the West to conceive of a
new way of thinking them. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Tsubo Uchi
speaks of a “double assimilation” of the West by Japan. He describes this as an
openness, firstly, to Western theatre through imitation and study, and secondly, to a
selection in the West’s “new spirit”13 of what could naturally enrich a revitalising
of Japanese traditional arts. With the emergence of Butoh, Hijikata adopts a similar
position: he does not clearly reject secular traditions because they represent an
attachment to a regressive nationalism, but rather thinks that traditions are not able
to properly render the Japanese essence.14 The notions of individualism, liberalism
and innovation that Butoh sees proper to the West are thus used to revisit and not
evacuate its own past. In this sense, Butoh is of interest when it comes to think how
traditions and systems of codes that underlie artistic production are established,
because of this conscious exploration of its a priori given opposites, past and the
West, as expressed in Saburoh Hasegawa’s words: “We do not have the right to be
dishonest in regard to our aspiration toward Western culture. This exploration has
to be achieved”.15 Examining Butoh throughout history also means to take into
account its changing political position in line with the socio-economical context it
finds itself in. In contact with other arts and cultures, Butoh developed into what
Odette Aslan calls a “postbutoh”,16 which main purpose turned from finding a
Japanese essence to becoming a discipline in its own right. As such, it integrated
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dance history and was ascribed a recognisable and sellable identity. In line with
Georges Banu’s perspective,17 one can hypothesize that the reason of the
exhaustion of Butoh’s power of revolt lies in this integration within a global dance
history.
3. Irony and paradox
I have elaborated on different set ideas about Butoh above in order to shed a
light on Leroy’s ironic and contradictory stance toward binaries like the difference
between Western and Japanese bodies and the power given to tradition over
creation. Having chosen choreography, and not editorial nor critical essay, Leroy
expresses this stance with an aesthetics Laurence Louppe calls “deceptive”, where
the audience
cannot find in an artistic element what makes it part of the
artistic canons, since the element is rather withdrawn or
evasive, and thus, does not take part in a circulation of
“finished” objects.18
During the performance, the spectators first laugh when seeing Leroy dance
Butoh. Is it because they do not expect these “kinds” of movements from this
“kind” of body? Is it because of the fully lit theatre or the seemingly absence of
any intention of impressing them induced by the lecture mode in which sometimes
is Leroy?
Without explicitly formulating a critique on the “cultural meanings” revealed
by “bodily markers”,19 Leroy is “deceptive” because he never yields to frankly
affirm that he is dancing Butoh. This creates an impression of awkwardness: why
would I expect Butoh to be solemn or spiritual? Why was I thinking of a dancer in
the darkness when coming here? This impression comes in part from the fact that
Leroy comes and goes from one medium to another and reaches various degrees of
“distantiation”. The result is that one cannot identify exactly when there is an
“intentional address” or an “explicit exchange” between the performer and the
spectators out of which can be extracted a “third object”, be it a work, “Truth” or
“presence”. His performance can rather be described as an attempt to escape the
body’s identification or “specularisation”,20 just as in Self-Unfinished, where the
body is disarticulated to the point of “invisibility”.21 More precisely, for classical
dance, what is visible on stage is symbolic and stands for something invisible
beyond it, whereas for contemporary dance, the invisible body is “deceptive”
because it shows that there is nothing to see but what is on and outside the stage.
One paradox that is potent in Leroy’s performance is that in presenting a certain
homage to Butoh figures, he turns toward them who are exterior to him, and at the
same time, he turns toward himself by living or showing that he lives a personal,
even intimate, transcendental experience on stage, this being expressed by the time
Catherine Girardin
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he needs to “recover” from dancing Butoh excerpts, and the strong facial
expressions, as if he was possessed, he needs to get rid of in order to come back to
a lecture mode. Leroy proceeds then to a come-and-go between Butoh icons, their
bodies in the past, belonging to a certain degree to a common memory of dance
and Leroy’s person and body on stage, making of Produits a scenic manifestation
of an unfinished and living process.
4. Process over form
I have described Produits as being contradictory, fluid and unfinished, which
pushes to think that it values process over form, in other words, the
“circumstances” (Circonstances) over the “products” (Produits)… As such, Leroy
can be said to be a Konzepttanzer, following Johannes Birringer, because “by
shifting the emphasis on process, and not result, the processual operations point
towards dance as an event that is constituted within a matrix of possibilities.”22
Leroy creates works that point to the stage by emptying the latter out, he considers
the stage for its quality of dispositive, as a space of transformation of images, and
does not invest it with a particular set of signs and movements intended to convey
meaning and prompted to unravel for the duration of the performance.
Béatrice Picon-Vallin uses the term “anamnesis”, that is, the emergence of
something to one’s memory, to describe the way artists from the beginning of the
twentieth century, like Antonin Artaud, expressed themselves about their contact
with Asian theatres.23 What is of interest here is that the anamnesis supposes that
what comes to one’s memory has already been experienced in the past, thus, that it
is not completely new and unfamiliar. The relation those artists had with Asian
theatres was one of temporally distanced familiarity, as if those unknown artistic
forms were actually an artefact of memory that was part of a quasi-mystical or
universal past for which it is not unlikely to say the artists developed a sort of
nostalgia. Produits does not explicitly approve nor disapprove of this nostalgic
attitude, but rather uses performance to set in motion these processes through
which images come to memory and are produced from both known and unknown
elements. The spectator can interrogate his or her own relation to Butoh images,
how the latter came to be assimilated and associated amongst themselves, and if
they are perceived or not as an idealized past of him or herself.
Guy Cools’ remarks on the choreographic creative process he took part in by
being a dance dramaturge reveal how the come-and-go between language and body
can also become one of the ways to put forth the process by which images are
transformed, he says that the practice of dance consists in “the internalization of
lived experiences”, and that dance is “the activation and the stimulation of the
body’s proper memory”.24 Considering this, the idea that Leroy’s detailed narration
of his souvenirs and the dance sequels he executes in between them is a way of
putting forth the retrieval of his memory through the body becomes plausible.
Leroy does not create a performance inspired by Butoh, and even less so does he
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present those images as “true” or “authentic”, but rather shares with the audience
his own images of Butoh.
5. Authenticity and self-reflexivity
Produits calls on images and information that are associated to what is
generally understood as being “Butoh”, just like a performance, a book or a Web
page on Butoh. The difference is that this performance both incarnates “Butoh”
and builds itself as a comment on the latter, thus setting itself aside from it as well.
That is why Produits is a blatant demonstration of Manchev’s idea that dance is an
experimental body practice that reflects the transformability of the body, but which
is also autonomous from the invention of its techniques, the latter which it can then
reflect on.25 Following this, Leroy seems to ask to what extent we need Butoh to
learn and express “Butoh”. One of the questions that come to mind when attending
Produits is indeed the authenticity of what could be identified as Butoh in the
performance. Does Leroy dance Butoh and is he a Butoh dancer? The performance
tends to lead the reflection toward what Roger Copeland understands as being
authenticity, that is, the taking into consideration of what is generally seen in art as
a “deviation” caused by the “‘corruptions’ of the contemporary culture”26 for “a
creative response to the realities of the […] cultural and economic situations” of
the societies they are produced in.27
By invalidating the presence of visual signs, body practices and “Japaneseness”
as criteria of authenticity, Produits conceptualizes Butoh as a constantly changing
set of images and ideas. From this perspective, one can even say that Produits,
from the side of the creator as from that of the audience, is the demonstration that
Butoh is also this set of images and ideas it stimulates outside itself. Leroy’s
position toward authenticity is similar to Tsubo Uchi’s, who did not deny his
interest for the West and the influence of the latter on Japanese arts, as he explores
the phenomenon of the “contamination” of traditions consciously. He does not
produce Butoh, but Butoh’s production by images, thus engendering a selfreflexive performance. In link with this, Produits neither abides to “the fact of
difference”28 which makes the Other “ungraspable” nor to the “Western
progressive ideology of sameness”,29 it rather has the potential to pinpoint the
zones where the Other and the same are transformed.
5. Conclusion: Leroy’s infinity
In conclusion, Produits stays as far as possible from closure and fixity by
adopting a tongue-in-cheek attitude and an unstable position toward artistic
disciplines and forms of discourse. The metamorphosis the images called on by
Produits go through has no before nor after. Instead, Leroy tries to make sense of
the performative act of “displacement” itself, as Jean-Luc Nancy exposes:
Catherine Girardin
7
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“meaning” is the movement of an incessant transfer from hit to
hit, which is less felt like a signified deposit than like a
signifying sending, or a sending of significance, which is
always renewed.30
Since Butoh as background is indeed not devoid of any significance, multiple
questions concerning the relation between image and meaning come up, for
instance, what is the interaction between memory and fantasy in the transformation
of images? The constant exchange between the body and its physical and cultural
environment which characterizes what Leroy calls the “open body”31 of dance is
here applied to image: Produits explores the life of images by asking how images
come to be associated, rather than taking their association for granted by looking
for its meaning. Produits is a reflection on the possibilities of why the
contingencies it reassembles coexist; it does not have the pretention to find why, in
an encompassing gesture, they do so.
Notes
1
Debray, Vie et mort de l’image, 394. Translated by the author from: “Quand tout
se voit, rien ne vaut.”
2
Hijikata in Sas, ‘De chair et de pensée’, 49. Translated by the author from:
“j’étais emporté dans le flux des couleurs qui flottaient autour de moi, et ni
l’essence des choses ni l’intérieur de ma mémoire ne m’étaient fidèles
compagnons. […] Le sentiment du corps dont on est certain (oui, c’est bien moi)
m’était ôté.”
3
Leroy’s formation in science and his years of teaching in biology before getting
involved in choreography can inform the reading of his works.
4
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, s.v. “metamorphosis.”
5
Translated by the author as: “Products of Other Circumstances”.
6
Translated by the author as: “Xavier Does Some Rebutoh”.
7
Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 18.
8
“Produits” will be used throughout this text to refer to the performance Produits
d’autres circonstances.
9
Manchev, ‘Horizons’, 2. Translated by the author from: “une figure paradoxale,
figure de la transgression ou de la suspension de la figure elle-même, et par
conséquent figure d’une puissance formatrice et transformatrice allant au-delà des
limites de la forme figée.”
10
In Produits d’autres circonstances, Leroy mentions that he prefers the term
“choreography” rather than “dance” to characterize his practice.
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11
Hijikata in Aslan, ‘Du butô féminin au masculin’, 71. Translated by the author
from: “Je ne crois ni en une méthode d’enseignement, ni en une maîtrise des
mouvements.”
12
Leroy, Produits.
13
Uchi in Picon-Vallin, foreword to Butô(s), 11. Translated by the author from:
“l’esprit nouveau”.
14
Picon-Vallin, foreword to Butô(s), 12.
15
Hasegawa in Picon-Vallin, foreword to Butô(s), 12. Translated by the author
from: “Nous n’avons pas le droit de tricher avec l’aspiration qui nous porte vers la
culture d’Occident. Il faut mener cette exploration jusqu’au bout.”
16
Aslan, introduction to Butô(s),17. Translated by the author from: “postbutô”.
17
Banu, ‘Mythologie de la femme’, 102.
18
Louppe, ‘Les Frontières du corps’, 174. Translated by the author from:
“esthétique du ‘décept’, l’aspect déceptif faisant qu’un élément qui fait partie des
canons d’un art sera plus retiré ou plus évasif, ne participant plus à une circulation
d’objets ‘finis’.”
19
Cooper Albright, ‘Moving Contexts’, 47.
20
Louppe, ‘Les Frontières du corps’, 174.
21
Idem.
22
Birringer, ‘Dance and Not Dance’, 16.
23
Picon-Vallin, foreword to Butô(s), 15.
24
Cools, ‘Dance: A Translating Art’, 39.
25
Manchev, ‘Horizons’, 196.
26
Copeland, ‘Visual Hybrids vs. Vulgar Corruptions’, 57.
27
Shiner in Copeland, ‘Visual Hybrids vs. Vulgar Corruptions’, 59.
28
Ness in Lepecki, ‘For a Sensorial Manifesto’, 165.
29
Lepecki, ‘For a Sensorial Manifesto’, 165.
30
Nancy, ‘La métamorphose, le monde’, 79-80. Translated by the author from:
“déplacement” and “le ‘sens’ est le mouvement d’un renvoi incessant de touche en
touche […] vécu[…] moins comme un dépôt signifié que comme un envoi
signifiant, ou de signifiance, toujours renouvelé.”
31
Leroy, selfinterview.
Bibliography
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———. ‘Du butô féminin au masculin’. In Butô(s), edited by Aslan, Odette and
Béatrice Picon-Vallin, 53-101. Paris: CNRS, 2002.
Catherine Girardin
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culturel, Actes du 9e Festival international de nouvelle danse, edited by Chantal
Pontbriand, 21-30. Montreal: Parachutes, 2001.
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2002.
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nouvelle danse, edited by Chantal Pontbriand, 161-168. Montreal: Parachutes,
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Picon-Vallin, 7-15. Paris: CNRS, 2002.
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