How Can We Tell the Dancer from the Dance?

"What if dance were to be liberated from its figural or potential status, such that dance would be neither a metaphor for rational life nor an example of the way in which humans realise their creative potential? Dance might then be thought of as a motion or act that is not the realisation of some proper form -- the human -- but a departure from what is -- a pure becoming that is not the becoming of the human. It is in dance -- if we recall Nietzsche’s figure of the bacchanal -- that the self loses itself, becomes other than itself. Dance would, then, need to be considered less as an expression of a potential that pre-exists the actual dance, and more as a potentiality that is brought into being only as it acts or exists. Such a pure potentiality would not be limited by a proper end -- what it ought to bring into being -- nor by a preceding ground, nor by the form it expresses in this or that style. Dance would be style not as that which itself: style not as that technique through which creation takes place but as pure creativity with no end or ground outside itself.

The dance as act is at once fully actual, not the expression of some prior ground that it represents only in part, but at each moment fully itself, referring to nothing other than itself: not a signifier of some prior intent, nor the expression of some being before the act, but pure act in and for itself. And dance is also pure potentiality."

(Claire Colebrook: How can we tell the Dancer from the Dance? - The Subject of Dance and the Subject of Philosophy, Topoi 2005)

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