Alexandra Baybutt, University College London
Anna Leon, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
This contribution is a collaboration between a movement and performance practitioner, researcher and educator; and a dance historian. It takes as a starting point the circumstance of ‘being late’—to the party, to academia, to a dance class, to oneself, to the opening of a performance curtain, to choreographic trends—to explore how Western dance practices and theoretical discourses about dance perform, reflect and reinforce power-laden concepts and enactments of spacetime. ‘Not all lateness is the same’ is a dialogue between dance history (conceived as researching, writing, teaching and learning) and dance practice (conceived as learning, doing and watching). There is a how-to for this text, found in the afterword. That is our way of promising that the text has an intention, knows where it is going, will answer your questions. The impatient can go straight there, already reading in a non-linear way that we encourage. A dis/mis-placed how-to is our way of aligning the expectation of going somewhere with a resistance to it. To not say in advance what the text will do is a way of proposing that the text does; that what it does will be done whether one says it in advance or not. If we don’t say what we want, hope, or think that will be, the doing will nevertheless be done, by you, and by us, and by the text.
To not say how the text will do what it does is a way of proposing that what the text does cannot unfold without its how. We explore lateness within and leaking out of specific epistemic frameworks that define modes, limits, and values of knowledge production. Our engagement with the notion of lateness probes and pushes these frameworks—as well as the wider capitalist frameworks of production in which they are embedded—considering how dominant Eurocentric, modernist dance historiography places dance in a linear temporality of periodisation and a centre/periphery spatialisation, thus creating a hierarchical dynamic whereby peripheralised scenes, practices and even peoples are in a constant state of ‘lateness’ (typified in the 2000s with the expansion of Europe).
The text nevertheless does not clearly state where it will do what it does. This is a way of proposing that the text does, every time it is activated as text, anew. It is a way of not fixing the text in (epistemic) timespace: to not use the text to confirm the existence of a field by claiming it. To not say where the text is doing its work on lateness is to acknowledge that this where might be lost between the where of the writing and the where of the publishing, which are also related through hierarchies of lateness. In an interwoven way, our engagement with lateness confronts dominant modes of practicing and teaching dance in the Western tradition which posit lateness—to the dance lesson, to the beat, to the rhythm of expected progress, to the conformity of a synchronised group—as a flaw, despite improvisational and somatic practices’ acknowledgement of, and even desire for, the open-endedness of immanence in the ongoing-ness of doing. Expansions of dance practice, provision (conditions, policies, education, funding, infrastructure) and research, seen for instance through counter arguments to its prohibitive ableism through notions of crip time, have questioned forms of duration but not erased the dominance of setting timeframes of events that define and separate. Investigating these negotiations, we propose that some lateness can be reclaimed in a multitemporal and decentralised epistemic-practical framework.
A deliberate or accidental resituating of something central (e.g. a person, place, culture, value system) or near the centre towards an edge; or an—again deliberate or accidental—horizontalisation that counters the binary of centre/periphery. (For the notion of centre see ‘peripheralisation’.) The process results in material changes in terms of access to resources, knowledge, and opportunities, as well as self-perception and judgement from others. To decentralise is to diffuse or to scatter; with it we infer relations between parts that are in motion. A ‘centre’ (e.g. of power, attention, initiation) may thus arise anywhere and be subject to change, as is the case for what is identifiable in that centre; or a centre may not be occupied at all. To decentralise is therefore also to multiply rather than monopolise, an action that results in overlapping, concurrent, and coexisting realms and temporalities of belonging.
A mental process through which one commits to take action towards change. Decision-making can result from deliberation as well as habit. A decision could be forced, or there could be a long delay in making one. Responsibilities, risk, and factors beyond seemingly individual control affect the grounds on which a decision is made or not made. For example, decisions to change carbon use, develop mitigation, and support physical and social adaptations requires political, (trans)national, and individual action. The lateness of these decisions is already producing unevenly distributed global crises: floods, access to food, water, shelter. When will it be too late, who decides this, and for whom is it already too late? The profit-driven wish to accumulate that is fundamental to capitalism is generating the crisis of bad decisions, indecision, and forced decision. Decision, indecision, forced decision, timing decision are also parts of choreographic practice, especially score-based, open-ended practice.
A context-specific set of assumptions, modes, and methods for thinking and investigating that defines the limits of what is knowable, posits how knowledge can be accessed, and determines criteria for what knowledge is considered valid. Epistemic frameworks are like languages: familiarity and ease—and therefore an investment of time—is required to access them. Multiple epistemic frameworks may coexist within a given context, usually with clearly distinguishable power distributions; i.e. some epistemic frameworks are dominant while others are marginalised or discredited. Revealing epistemic frameworks as such can be a way of challenging their position of power, even if always-already late.
A blemish or imperfection, devaluing an object, person or phenomenon. Something that weakens or invalidates. In an individualist-capitalist context, flaws are also often considered as something to counteract or control by the subject having or experiencing them. Unlike the Japanese aesthetic and Buddhist concept of wabi sabi that heightens acceptance of transience and imperfection, a flaw is decidedly negative. It is used pejoratively to assert specific hierarchies of value in which any comparison made is based upon a seemingly shared understanding of a fixed set of criteria.
An alphabetically organised list of words and their definitions, usually accompanying a text in which these words are used. The glossary has multiple functions: by selecting the terms that will be defined, it posits their importance in the text; by giving specifically relevant definitions that would not be the ones available in an encyclopaedic or dictionary entry, it situates the terms and therefore the text itself; and by organising its contents alphabetically, it horizontalizes them into a web of interrelated discursive choices. The glossary mediates between reader and text, explaining the text’s intentions in using certain terms but also allowing the terms to be used outside of their placement in the text. The glossary is a form of paratext. Rather than leaning on explicit references, our glossary entries reflect 15+ years of reading, research, and work, so as to foreground current definitions necessary for approaching this particular collection of scores. In this way, this glossary acknowledges that it cannot be definitive, as that would foreclose conceptual experimentation, semantic shifts and open-ended (un)learning.
Our understanding of the ways in which we do—or practice—history; that is, different ways of understanding and narrating the past in relation to the present (including the understanding of ‘the past’ as ‘what has come before’ and ‘the present’ as ‘now’ in a more or less linear order). Historiography describes different ways of doing history, identifies their epistemic frameworks, and theorises about how different ways of doing history result in different anchorings in different presents. In doing so, historiography can point to how specific presents are rendered possible by specific historical narratives; and how alternative, plural historical narratives could ground alternative ways of living the present.
Prevailing questions, disciplinary conventions, extant research paradigms, reading, methods, and ethics coalesce into a research methodology that defines an ontological (research object) and epistemic (the knowledge it holds) position, and you as researcher within that. This framework is itself an example of knowledge production in its composition, alongside what that methodology enables to be framed, generated, argued, and contested. Modes of knowledge production themselves entail a politics of positions, identities, institutions, and capital. More than only individual knowledge, knowledge production relies upon the socially contingent nature of enhancing or repressing the capacity to act with and through knowledge, making knowledge sharing diverse and open-ended or not.
In dominant Western/globalised academic and more precisely historiographic discourse, a period (usually roughly ranging from the 16th to the mid-20th century, but varying, as for instance ‘dance modernity’ frequently refers to dance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) as well as an understanding of the experience of that period as such: in other words, a specific experiential mode of inscription in time. Modernity is a Eurocentric concept, reflecting the epistemic dominance of Western Europe in defining temporality. Because of this dominance, a Western European relationship with time intervenes in non-Western-European experiences of time, peripheralizing alternative periodisations and temporal understandings. Everyday, common understandings of ‘modern’ are influenced by—although not identical with—the classificatory work of the academic notion of modernity.
A conception of life as emergent; not theorised as predetermined (teleological) or involving an elsewhere to eventually get or escape to (transcendence). Certitude is open to question, as conclusions are often temporary. Life, research, knowledge are ongoing in correspondence, part of multiple folds and available to different ways of telling themselves or being told. Even with endings and beginnings, open-endedness would not totalise or close off with singularity. For in the movement of open-endedness we find no map of supremacy, but rather an invitation to continue: a debate, the potentials of subjectification and becoming, and maybe even democratic practices through new possibilities of inclusion. In this perspective, open-endedness distributes and multiplies (political, epistemic) agency by refusing that outcomes, or conclusions are ever entirely foregone.
There is the physics of time and space that humans do not control, like the spinning of the earth on its slightly changing axis as it rotates around the sun. Then there are all the efforts made by governments, corporations, businesses, discourses, to measure, predict, understand space and time by creating methods for perceiving duration, direction, velocity, and force through their effects. These are processes of knowledge production and of forming epistemic frameworks around temporality and spatiality. These efforts may attempt to quantify or privilege discrete elements, but also compose them; so a sequencing of spaces and times itself produces effects such as making normal, making dramatic, making machines, making art.
Text that appears alongside another text, within a convention positing the former as secondary to the latter; this is usually reflected in that the accompanying text is fragmentary while the accompanied text has a more uninterrupted flow. While a paratext is often considered secondary to a ‘main’ text, a paratext—like a glossary—transforms the reading of the ‘main’ text by elaborating (unfolding, unpacking) and situating it in specific ways. This occurs through references to other texts as well as non-textual elements (like performance works). The paratext provides a network of references around the ‘main’ text but does not explain how the text is related to these references. We derive our paratexts from our situated, subjective archives and references. We do not follow a citational practice of agreement (i.e. we do not agree with the content of all our references, and sometimes formulate our thoughts in counteraction to them) nor reduce discourses to individual authors.
The historiographic decision and act of dividing the past into discrete (albeit at times overlapping) periods. When periodising, historians attempt to describe historical shifts, distinguishing one era from another. Their perception of these shifts depends on their epistemic framework; the resulting periodisation therefore reflects and reinforces the epistemic framework in which it was defined. Through periodising, historiography creates specific narratives of the past and specific conceptual tools for understanding it. In modernist historiography, the end of a period might be announced by agents proclaiming to embody the advent of the next in a linear temporality where a rupture with the past becomes a precondition for the future to come. The linear time of modernist historiography was construed in a Eurocentric manner, whereby narratives of forwardness and backwardness, winners and losers, progress and decline or primitivism became grounds for racialisation. In this way, periodisation has also served as a violent means of controlling narratives, attributing differential degrees of agency, and erasing the relevance of peripheralised groups.
To be pushed to the side, to the edge, to a less-than, semi-relevant, or irrelevant status by a variety of forces and processes of power. Naming a hotspot that aligns place with activity enables comparisons between concentrations of energy to help focus attention and stratify where resources could be further added. Doing this makes other places peripheral. Unlike decentralisation, the effects of peripheralization on ideas, concepts, modes of production, processes, and people can be disempowering. While peripheralisation is a spatial concept, its processual impacts are also temporal: being pushed into irrelevance might also entail exclusion from shared temporality, both in the form of the inability to participate in dominant temporal experience and in the sidelining of the sense of time of those deemed irrelevant. However, as the history of the avant garde indicates, a periphery can eventually become a new core as what was once less well-known or marginal (e.g. Surrealism) can gain in popularity or ubiquity, even becoming canonical. This can, and often does, involve appropriation.
The noun practice, a practice, not its verb friend to practise, means the application or use of an idea. A practice inherently involves duration, maybe repetition, and more often than not, movement. It is often developed to be habitual with specific procedural elements that are discernible to the one doing it or observing it. Sometimes it is fun or necessary to change a practice. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to retain a practice. Asking what someone does (alone, with others, with tools, with attention etc) is to ask about what their practice is. The answer, e.g. a practice of; a practice for; has somewhere in it an idea about that practice.
A plan of events or tasks for a specific period of time, like a day. The decisions made by a schedule determine the organisation of people and resources in space and time and rely on coordination with other matrixes of decisions, like a calendar year and days of the week. Being able to predict a start and end, or arrival and departure, was accelerated by mechanisation and industrialisation to generate mobility between spaces and places or the fixing of an event duration. For groups to participate in a shared event, a schedule acts as a shared contract to make it possible to travel together. To travel together is not always possible.
A set of instructions, propositions, or invitations to do something, like a performance. Scores as instructions for producing music date back to at least 1400 BCE. Scores can be made with spoken or written words or graphic design of words, lines, and images, and may use pre-existing music or movement notation or one’s own inventions for communication. Scores can be very precise, whether elaborately detailed or minimal. They can be very open to interpretation or less so. Scores and scoring are used by dancers and choreographers to inform performances or record elements of them (for later transmission or even exhibition). They help with thinking about features, qualities, intensities, habits considered essential and their rupture. The scores in this text are intended to be significant through their doing rather than them being observed. They therefore propose dance practice as a self-reflexive process of knowledge production, rather than as event or object to be watched.
Or reflexivity, is an ethical imperative in research and artistic creation. It involves examining one's own assumptions, beliefs, and judgement systems, as these influence research questions, methods and processes. Self-reflexivity confronts and questions who we are as researchers or artists, and how this positionality guides us and our relationships with other people or things. Self-reflexivity helps to account for, if not make full sense of, emergent affects and responsibilities in undergoing research that invariably impacts upon ourselves and others. One’s unique positionalities and multiple overlapping aspects of identity effect every step of research and/or artistic design and process. Self-reflexivity can enable increased awareness or acknowledgement of structural positions and power dynamics that are more or less explicit in each context when thought about relationally. Whilst these dynamics shift from place to place and based upon who is present, one’s situated position often informs decisions to do, act, embody something—or not. A researcher attempts, in moments of self-reflexivity, to understand the perspectives and positions of others as such, even if not to embody, perform or inhabit them as an actor might.
A quality that can describe a motion, be it physical or metaphorical. As an indicator of reduced or minimal speed, slowness requires a (potentially implicit but nonetheless intersubjectively shared) sense of standard or neutral pace. As such, slowness is dependent on a—be it physical or metaphorical—normative temporalisation of motion. As a critical reaction to this normative temporalisation, slowing down can be associated with sustainability, empowerment, indulgence, or even pleasure. Nevertheless, by being situated within a normative temporal value system, slowness also reveals its dependence on privilege, such as financial resources, ability, or temporal abundance. Similarly, in some cases slowness might be necessary—stemming from illness, disability, neurodivergence, fatigue—but it is no less resistant for its necessity. Within a normative temporal value system, slowness is also a marker and maker of lateness.
A set of practices engaging with generating, developing, challenging, understanding, modifying, critiquing concepts, as mental constructs through which the world can be understood. The main medium of theory is discourse, i.e. situated, context-specific, and power-imbued language. In its modes of thinking, its concepts, and its discourse, theory is bound to epistemic frameworks; but one of (critical) theory’s main goals is to question epistemic frameworks, including its own, and reveal their impacts.
A dimension in which life unfolds. Time is a sensed parameter of our existence as living beings that underlines the finitude of our being. Time is also notoriously hard to grasp and conceptualise. It is perhaps as a result that temporality is more vulnerable to being defined through epistemically dominant discourses: a Christian-dominated model of the nation state has imposed the structuring of time into weeks, and the pause of activity on Sunday; a capitalist-dominated model of work and productivity has imposed a counting of time and its effective use, turning even leisure time into something that can be ‘saved’; a medically-dominated model of age has imposed an understanding of life as a series of phases, some of which—especially for people read as women—are tacitly understood to be periods of decline; an ableist model of activity has imposed a homogeneised temporal pace that functions as a physical and mental barrier for many. In a highly controlled timescape, those who are late face consequences limiting their capacity to pursue a good life and opportunities for participation in the community. Choreographic keeping of time can reflect and reinforce, or counter and trouble, dominant ways of inscribing bodies in time.
To perform this score, you need to want to go and attend a dance performance.
Find out the date and time of a performance you want to attend.
Figure out how long it would take you to go there on foot or with your mobility aid.
Stop what you are doing in good time so you would not be late to attend the performance and go there on foot or with your mobility aid.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Polity.
Filliou, Robert. 1970. Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. Verlag Gebr.
Finer, Jem. 1999–ongoing. Longplayer. https://longplayer.org/.
Groys, Boris. 2002. “The Loneliness of the Project.” New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory 1 (1).
Hauswedell, Tessa, Axel Körner, and Ulrich Tiedau. 2019. Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery: Asymmetrical Encounters in Europe and Global Contexts. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787350991.
Hoghe, Raimund. 2016. La Valse. http://www.raimundhoghe.com/maximized/lavalse.html.
Kenyon, Simone. 2020. Into the Mountain. https://www.intothemountain.co.uk/.
Kunst, Bojana. 2004. “The Politics of Affection and Uneasiness.” Art Margins. https://artmargins.com/politics-of-affection-and-uneasiness/.
Marcalo, Rita. 2019. One Last Dance—An Chéad Damh. https://onelastdance-ancheaddamhsa.tumblr.com/.
da Piacenza, Domenico. [ca 1425] 1995. De Arte Saltandi Et Choreas Ducendi. Translated by A. William Smith. In Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza, edited by A. William Smith, 10–67. Pendragon Press.
Stengele, Julischka. 2020. Ballast I Existenz. https://julischka.eu/ballast-%7C-existenz-1.
Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Polity.
Wilkie, Fiona. 2015. Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476890.
(Decision; Modernity; Organisation of time and space; Peripheralisation; Schedule; Self-reflexivity; Slowness; Time)
To perform this score, you need at least four people, pens and paper.
Divide the participants into two sub-groups (A & B) along an arbitrary criterion: for instance, by birthdate or height. Each sub-group should have at least two people.
The members of each group discuss among themselves and decide on a dance-related topic they are interested in. They collect their ideas why this topic is important, what their main views on it are, what more they would like to learn about it etc., into a short document of about a page or two.
Group A moves on to another spot in the space and discusses how their selected topic can give rise to a new one. For example, if their first focus was stillness, maybe they decide to pursue soundlessness as a derivative. They create a document on the new theme.
Group B, in the meantime, visits Group A’s first working spot and reads their initial document (in this example, the one about stillness). Group B members discuss the ideas in the document and their own views on the topic. They make a new document, which combines their ideas with those of Group A.
When their task is done, the groups continue in the same way to new stations, i.e. Group A continues to produce new documents on new themes while Group B follows the trail. If Group A is not inspired, they can revisit any of the previous stations (including Group B’s first document and all documents reworked by Group B) to find inspiration. Each group moves on when their task is done without waiting for the other group to finish.
Asentić, Saša, and Ana Vujanović. 2008. “My Private Bio-Politics A Performance on a Paper Floor.” Performance Research 13 (1): 70–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528160802465573.
Beggan James K., and Allison Scott Pruitt. 2013. “Leading, Following and Sexism in Social Dance: Change of Meaning as Contained Secondary Adjustments.” Leisure Studies 33 (5): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2013.833281.
Brown, Trisha. 1971. Roof Piece. https://trishabrowncompany.org/repertory/roof-piece.html.
Burt, Ramsay. 2004. “Undoing Postmodern Dance History.” Sarma. http://sarma.be/docs/767.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928652.
Dharwadker, Aparna. 2010. “Representing India’s Pasts: Time, Culture and the Problems of Performance Historiography.” In Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait. University of Iowa Press.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816670154.001.0001.
Isou, Isidore. 1965. Ballets Ciselants, Polythanasiques, Hypergraphiques et Infinitesimaux. Roberto Altmann.
Shunt collective, 2005–6. Amato Saltone. https://www.shunt.co.uk/amatosaltone.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1991. Cotton and Iron. In When The Moon Waxes Red, 11–28. Routledge.
Vevar, Rok. 2018. Dan, noč + človek = Ritem: Antologija slovenske sodobnoplesne publicistike 1918–1960 [Day, night + man = Rhythm: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Journalism 1918–1960]. Maska.
Vujanović, Ana. 2008. “Tiger’s Leap: A Method of Reloading the History of Local Scenes.” https://www.anaVujanovic.net/2012/03/tigers-leap-a-method-of-reloading-the-history-of-local-scenes/.
(Decision; Epistemic framework; Historiography; Knowledge production; Modernity; Periodisation; Peripheralisation; Theory)
To perform this score, you need a group of people and someone observing the adherence to the original procedure.
Materials required:
A gym or yard with clearly marked edges 20m apart
The recording of the beeps (see www.topendsports.com/testing/tests/20mshuttle.htm)
As many copies of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism as you can find
Cloth bags (big enough to carry in your arms), one with soil, one with chalk dust, one with sugar, one with grain, one with tea (these can be dried tea leaves or those collected from already-steeped tea)
Beep test procedure: the ‘beep test’ is a fitness test of the aerobic energy system
This test involves continuous running/rolling between two lines 20m apart, in time to recorded beeps. The participants stand behind one of the lines facing the second line, and begin running when instructed by the recording. The speed at the start is quite slow. You continue running between the two lines, turning when signalled by the recorded beeps. After about one minute, a sound indicates an increase in speed, and the beeps will be closer together. This continues each minute (level). If the line is reached before the beep sounds, you must wait until the beep sounds before continuing. If the line is not reached before the beep sounds, you are given a warning and must continue to run/travel to the line, then turn and try to catch up with the pace within two more ‘beeps’. You are given a warning the first time you fail to reach the line (within 2 meters), and eliminated after the second warning. Someone needs to be nominated or self-nominate to observe the players and give the warnings.
Additions to the original procedure:
When someone gives you the second warning to leave the beep test running, take a copy from the side of the space and start reading aloud Hannah Arendt’s words from chapter 9 The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man from part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism until the end of the score’s activation. You can choose wherever you wish to be in the space.
OR
When someone gives you a warning, or before then if you are tired/bored/had enough of running/rolling, or didn’t even want to or couldn’t, go pick up a bag from the side of the space. Then start circling the whole event space on the periphery using whatever steps/movements you would like to use that reflect the mood you are in. As you travel, scatter the contents of the bag into the space whenever you wish.
OR
When someone gives you a warning, go up to them, stare them in the eyes, and start shouting BEEP BEEP BEEP at them. They can choose to stand still, join the reading, join the encircling or carry on observing the remaining runners and giving warnings. Your shouting of ‘BEEP’ can become singing, whispering, speaking.
The beep test finishes when no one is left running and everyone is alternatively occupied.
Chen, Mel Y., Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, eds. 2023. Crip Genealogies. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478023852.
Cvejić, Bojana. 2015. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437396_1.
Gordon, Avery F. 2018. The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins. Fordham University Press.
Helguera, Pablo. 2010. “Alternative Time and Instant Audience.” http://pablohelguera.net/2013/02/alternative-time-and-instant-audience-2010/.
Jeffrey, Ellen. 2024. The After-Hours: Labour and Repetition in (Un)conscious Bodies. Lecture-performance.
Lefebvre, Henri. (1992) 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Continuum.
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge.
Louis XIV. 1663. Lettres patentes du roy, pour l’établissement de l’Académie royale de danse en la ville de Paris. Le Petit.
Maslin, Mark. 2021. Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
McCarren, Felicia. 2003. Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Stanford University Press.
Price, Margaret. 2017. “Moving Together: Toward a Theory of Crip Spacetime.” https://www.margaretprice.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/smith-talk-4-17-17.docx.
Schmalisch, Romana. 2013. “The Choreography of Labour.” In Notes sur les mouvements 1, 2–5. Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. https://leslaboratoires.org/article/journal-notes-sur-les-mouvements/la-choregraphie-du-travail.
Schwarz, Hillel. 1992. “Torque. The New Kinesthetic of the Twentieth Century.” In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 71–127. Zone Books.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1989. Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik. Suhrkamp.
Wilding, Faith. 1972. Waiting. https://vimeo.com/401283742.
(Decision; Flaw; Decentralisation; Modernity; Open-endedness; Organisation of time and space; Practice; Self-reflexivity; Slowness; Time)
To perform this score, you need to be the teacher of a public dance class.
Someone has entered your class after it has already started.
Do you:
a) Ignore them
b) Ignore them until you can reasonably include them
c) Acknowledge them c1) with friendliness c2) with hostility c3) physically (e.g. gesture)
d) Acknowledge them and give alternative instructions
e) Acknowledge them and ask the group to recap the class so far
f) Some combination of the above
g) Something else
No one is late.
Do you:
a) Take it for granted
b) Thank everyone for being on time
c) Remind everyone of the start time for the next class
d) A combination of the above
e) Something else
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 2018. “Bergson on Education and the Art of Life.” In Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition, 153–172. Bloomsbury.
Barr, Sherrie. 2020. “Embodying One’s Teaching Identity – Making the Tacit Explicit.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 11 (4): 454–467. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2019.1673473.
Bottlefed. 2009. Hold Me Until You Break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEEz8RoXx7w.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804767149.
Hage, Ghassan, ed. 2009. Waiting. Melbourne University Press.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile. 1921. Rhythm, Music and Education. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Müller, Ivana. 2006. While we were holding it together. https://vimeo.com/235764472.
Ravaisson, Félix. (1838) 2008. Of Habit. Continuum.
(Decision; Epistemic framework; Knowledge production; Modernity; Open-endedness; Organisation of space and time; Peripheralisation; Practice; Schedule; Self-reflexivity)
To perform this score you need two people, each with their dance history books/references. Alternatively, you can meet in a library with a dance history section, as long as it covers the two people’s research interests. Each person’s research should focus on a different time/place.
Person (a): Look at your dance history books/references. Choose one and find the first periodisation it proposes; for example, the book might concern dance in ‘the interwar years’. (How) is the periodisation defined and justified?
Person (b): Look at your dance history books/references. Choose one and find the first spatialisation it proposes; for example, the book might concern dance in Flanders. (How) is the spatialisation defined and justified?
Both people together: Cross person (a)’s periodisation with person (b)’s spatialisation. In this example, look at Flemish (dance) history in the years defined as the interwar period. (How) does this spacetime make sense? (How) does it not make sense?
Repeat with other examples.
Burt, Ramsay, and Michael Huxley. 2020. Dance, Modernism and Modernity. Routledge.
Koselleck, Reinhart. (1985) 2004 [1985]. “Representation, Event, and Structure.” In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 105–114. Columbia University Press.
Kwan, SanSan. 2017. “When is Contemporary Dance?” Dance Research Journal 49 (3): 38–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767717000341.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz. 2008. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123 (3): 737–748. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.737.
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Vujanović, Ana, and Marta Popivoda. 2018. National Reconciliation: Freedom Landscapes. Performance-installation and film. https://mladinsko.com/en/program/31/national-reconciliation-freedom-landscapes/.
(Epistemic framework; Historiography; Knowledge production; Modernity; Periodisation; Peripheralisation; Theory)
To perform this score you need at least two people and all the materials that you usually use when working on/with/in dance. You should perform the first part of this score on your own, but if your usual dance work regularly involves other people, try to find a place where they are present (e.g. a corner in a studio where other people are rehearsing).
Part 1, each person separately:
Create an environment that brings together as many of the elements that make up your dance-related work as possible: sit in the studio where you practice; set out photographs of your workshops or performances; open the relevant folders on your computer; collect your notes and books…
Once your environment is ready, close your eyes and think of a party that you have attended (it can be a party you organised or were invited to), in any period in your life. Think about your relationship with time in this party: did you arrive (too) early? Did you arrive (too) late? Did you leave (too) early or (too) late? Was time passing too fast or too slowly? Did time feel suspended? Did you feel in-synch with other people’s time?
Take a blank sheet of paper and set a timer for 20 minutes. Start writing anything that comes to your mind in relation to the above questions. Follow free associations and do not censor or try to organise your thoughts.
Take a break and change environment. Come back and read your text. Then look at the dance environment surrounding you for as long as you need.
Part 2, all together:
Each person reads their text out loud or people exchange texts and read each other’s texts silently. After you have heard/read another person’s text, look at your own dance environment for as long as you need.
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(Epistemic framework; Modernity; Organisation of time and space; Practice; Self-reflexivity; Theory)
To perform this score, you need two people and quite a lot of space between them.
It can take place outside a public building like the Home Office, an Embassy, a concert hall.
Materials required: A visa or residency application (either yours, one from someone you know, or find a template from your government’s website or office)
Person (a) stands as if sitting on a horse. Pick from the many examples of statues of men on horses littering town and city public squares. Make sure the chest is puffed, the gaze is steely. Adopt the breath of what you think a self-proclaimed hero on a horse breathes like. Hold.
Person (b) stands far away but faces the other person. Holding a visa or residency application, they perform an ‘allongé’ action from Ballet with a capital B. This is an elongated posture, standing on one leg, the other extended behind you, with one arm reaching forward. No experience of Ballet is required to perform this action. The emphasis is on making the extending last as long as possible, so take your time, maybe even wait.
Allongé until you can no longer allongé. Then call ‘pass’. Drop the paper to the floor, jump on it three times as if it was on fire and you’re stamping it out*, then run to where person (a) is. Take up the posture.
When person (a) hears ‘pass’, fall to the floor and rebound 3 times. Then run to where person (b) was. Take up the posture.
Swap for a minimum of three times.
On the last run to swap places, after jumping on or by the visa/residency application, pick it up again and take it with you. Pause midway, say ‘pass’ to each other as kindly as you can. If the visa/residency application belongs to you, keep it. If not, pass it to the other person. Then walk away back into your day. Don’t re-meet to talk about the score.
*if you are worried about jumping on your real visa in case of damage, jump next to it as if there is a fire around it that you are putting out.
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(Epistemic framework; Historiography; Modernity; Organisation of time and space; Practice; Schedule; Self-reflexivity; Slowness; Time)
You can read this text in multiple temporalities, entering and exiting at different points. While it has an underlying dramaturgical logic, its fragmentary construction will result in your experiencing and understanding different texts in every entry.
You can read our glossary as a conceptual guidebook to the scores, following the glossary entries tagged under each score. You can read our glossary as a situated snapshot into a set of mobile understandings, asking yourself (again and again at different points in time) what your glossaries might be. You can read our glossary as an argument about lateness, peripheralisation, and a reclaiming of temporal margins.
You can read our scores as written prompts for action: as an invitation to try out and see how they unfold unpredictably in their being done. You can read our scores as translations of arguments into open-ended proposals for action—and therefore as proposals for how practice engages with concepts and theory is a set of practices. In this case, the scores are scripts for enactment or for vicarious rehearsal of enactment possibilities; they invite their potential users to de-centre lateness away from its association with a flawed condition. You can read our scores as digested, processed, enacted manifestations of the discursive and performative knowledges that reside within us.
You can read our paratext as a way to situate our scores, asking yourself (again and again at different points in time) what your paratexts might be. You can read our paratext as a reference list. You can read our paratext as a framing of our glossary: the paratext includes references, the glossary does not; the scores/actions mediating between them haunt the ways in which our digested references (paratext) are exteriorised in our definitions and perspectives (glossary).
This text is fundamentally open-ended and does not presume any singular conclusion or learning outcome in a teleological manner. It is anchored in ideas of non-systematic understanding and assumes that reading, acting and understanding by scholars, educators, and artists operate interrelatedly but also at different temporalities that might require different availabilities of time.
Introductions are tempting both to read and to write. They perform a lot of work; they might even overcome the shortcomings of the text they guide into. Introductions are also tempting to read and write because they have been, and still are, epistemic battlegrounds: they are the places where we—more often ‘we’ if marginalised, more often ‘we’ if activist, more often ‘we’ if working in embodied ways—get to say I am expected to do this like this, but I will not do it like this because I don’t want to confirm this epistemology. Introductions-as-epistemic-battlegrounds are the price to pay for subversions of epistemology elsewhere: you can do this, as long as you tell us beforehand what, how, and why you will do it.
It is perhaps one of the major wins of the introduction-as-epistemic-battleground that in Western-academic epistemology (that does not mean only Western universities, or even only universities) it is now expected to include, in this leading- or guiding-into a text, not only where that text is situated (in this or that epistemic field) but from where the text is written: what positionality it stems from. To resist the explicitness of positionality—to not say from where the text is written—is risky: it can deny that positionality matters, that previous wins matter, that where a text is written from impacts the knowable and the known that it communicates. But it can also mean to acknowledge that positionality, the knowable and the known shift, and that these shifts are often too granular to grasp through identity or context contours; to acknowledge that where the text is written from does not account for the diversity and beautiful incoherence of what it has digested and what speaks through it. It can also mean embracing the complexity of nuanced positions, where oppression and marginalisation coexist with privilege and dominance; as it can mean resisting the urge to make positionality overt as a prerequisite to speak. We insist performance philosophy, as a broad leaky field irrigating and irrigated by ongoing epistemic contestations, can hold such contradictions. When you come out of this text, you might not know precisely where we stand (when we wrote the text, or when we rewrote it, or when you read it) but you will know approximately where we stand (when we wrote the text, or when we rewrote it, or when you read it), this approximation being our—and your—capacity to learn, or our—and your—de facto inscription in time as change, or both, or both and more.
We thank Kinga Szemessy, Kirstin Smith, and Lucy Tyler for providing valuable feedback to early drafts of this article.
This research was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [T1336-G]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
Alexandra Baybutt works a lecturer in performance practice at University College London; somatic movement educator on modular programmes of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System for WholeMovement; and artist. Her research interests concern space: cellular, social, political. Recent works include Contemporary Dance Festivals in the Former Yugoslav Space: (in)dependent scenes (Routledge 2023) and Equity in Working Conditions in Dance (European Dance Development Network 2023).
Anna Leon is a researcher and curator based in Vienna. She is postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, working at the intersection of dance history, cultural history, critical theory and aesthetics. Her curatorial projects are situated between discursive, theoretical and performative practices and include the theory programme of Tanzquartier Wien (2022–2025), the Salzburg-based (artistic) research platform tanzbuero (with Gwendolin Lehnerer, Lisa Hinterreithner, and Dominik Jellen), Radio (non-)conference (with Netta Weiser) and Choreography+ (with Johanna Hilari). https://annaleon.net/
© 2025 Alexandra Baybutt and Anna Leon
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