So does that explain the title ‘Before Naming’?

I think it does. I think that once we realised we were fighting this kind of fixity or trying to avoid the dance becoming a copy of a previous dance, we got a lot closer to finding our title. I remember sending a whatsapp message – in one of our lengthy whatsapp conversations about this – that said: where is the mind before you name something? Before you know what it is, where is your mind?

That’s interesting. So that became your title?

Yes. It made sense that that became our title. Although we went through a process of learning to love it or learning to accept it. We both kept forgetting it, it was difficult to hang on to as a title. So, maybe it wasn’t the best title, because it took a long time to feel right, to feel like it was the right fit. And it makes me think that perhaps it’s not such a bad idea after all to name something after a mechanism, because that’s a way to avoid pointing to a narrative in the title. Or something that simply says what the dance is made up of. Something like ‘dance for two dancers with recorded music and improvised lighting design’. That’s kind of postmodern, reminds me of those early Merce Cunningham dances Sixteen dances for soloist and company of three. It’s dry and technical but it avoids narrative or an idea of meaning attached to the dance. It’s abstract. It allows you to see whatever you want to see. But, on that note, I still think we needed to find the title ‘Before Naming’, because with a purely mechanical title, you are disregarding the thought exercise or the philosophical exercise that is contained in the dance. With a mechanical title, I think you are in danger of the audience member saying ‘oh, this is an abstract dance, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just movement’. I think the title is helpful in pointing to the thought of the dance or the thought of the dance, which is different from the mechanics/workings of the dance.

Where did you come across this idea of the workings of the dance?

I think partly, in Cvejić’s book Choreographing Problems. She looks at a number of contemporary European choreographers and argues that their works, rather than presenting meanings, instead offer and enact a particular problem in the choreography itself. Right at the beginning of the book, she writes something like “don’t ask what does it mean, but how does it work.” And this of course offered a lot of interesting possibilities for me in my questioning of representation and representationalist frameworks in dance. I’ve been looking for ways in which to avoid representation, if this is even possible. I’m willing to accept that this may not be possible since we’re working with bodies. But still, I’m interested in making dances that avoid referring to objects outside of the dance. Is it possible to stay just with what the dance is doing, without thinking of the dance as being a mirror image of an outside world?

Why are you interested in representation and questioning representationalism?

Representationalism, as I understand it, is the reliance on the idea that language, and dance as another kind of language, stands in for things or ideas in ‘the real world’. Karen Barad talks about an over-reliance on language, I include dance in this, as an accurate mirror of the world. I’m interested in how contemporary dance, when it relies on this kind of meaning-making, recycles colonially scripted representations of the body and ideas of dance and imported notions of how dance is made. Achille Mbembe writes about Africa and the problem of representation. He says something like: in Africa the relation between words and the real world is shattered. The mirror is inaccurate and unreliable. Colonial scripts have taken on such power, even in our imaginations, that we cannot trust what the mirror reflects back to us. And if we cannot trust it, the mirror needs to be shattered, or at least we need to look for a way to work outside the representationalist economy, where we do not accept the relation between a word and a thing as a given or as true.

Maybe you can tell me more about the idea of democratic choreography and highlight how this might be different from collective authorship.

The idea of democratic choreography, I think of a process where the choreographic material is sourced from the performers, their lived experiences, their inner world and their personal vocabularies. The choreographer is not imposing movement onto the dancers’ bodies, but they’re still providing the frame that will hold the work together. In this way ‘democratic choreography’ is different from the idea of collectively authoring a work. In a situation where every participant is an author, each person is also fully responsible, completely accountable for what they bring to the composition and how the composition unfolds because of their actions.

This sounds weighty, like it’s a heavy burden to carry so much responsibility.

The burden, if you can call it that, of composing is shared. The responsibility is held lightly, so that the work starts to work, instead of the performers forcing the work. In the format of democratic choreography, the responsibility and accountability still fall to the choreographer. I do think that choreographers are able to give performers some of the responsibility in a work and sometimes do. The choreographer’s touch can be light, but ultimately a frame is still imposed. A radical shift would be for everyone in the composition to hold the same amount of responsibility and accountability.

Why do you think a more radical shift is needed? 

It comes back to the weight of representation in dance and dance-making. I’ve been reading Ashraf Jamal’s Predicaments of Culture in South Africa (2005). What I took away from this writing is the idea of trapped imaginary, where all imaginations are held up to a particular (dead) moment in time, and where the laws of perception that characterised apartheid society continue to operate. How can an oppressed imagination be freed? How can something new emerge? I think that dance and the conventional relationship between a choreographer/creator and dancer is such a great metaphor for how imagination can take on an oppressive role. The dancer’s body is traditionally the interpreter and never the author of the choreographer’s imagination. The choreographer’s imagination, including how close you can get to the unimaginable, may be enacted on and through the dancer’s body. 

That sounds extreme. Let’s go back to Before Naming. Where are you before naming something? Where are you before you know what it is? How do you collectively author/create/make? Is it possible to be in the same thinking place? Is a dance without meaning, not irrelevant?