Adwait 

Out of Turn

Curated by: Adwait Singh​

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Artists: Avril Stormy Unger, Bhaskar Bordoloi, Chathuri Nissansala, Katyayini Gargi, Lakshya Bhargava, Lipika Bhargava, Mohd. Intiyaz, Murari Jha, Resting Museum, Richa Arya, Ritika Sharma, Smita Urmila Rajmane, Tahsin Akhtar, Tsohil Bhatia

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Exhibition dates: 15  – 22 September 2024
Presented by MAG Contemporary at Bikaner House, New Delhi

CHOREOMANIA

 

On a hot summer day in July 1518, somewhere in the French city of Strasbourg, a woman called Frau Troffea stepped into a cobbled street and began to dance uncontrollably. She danced day and night as if possessed, capitulating periodically to exhaustion. She danced like this for a week. Her muscles locked into an inscrutable rhythm, carrying her well past the limits of endurance, deprivation, and shame. At first, the bystanders watched this bizarre performance with amusement. Before long, however, a few fell under the dancing spell themselves. By the time she was finally taken away, dozens had already succumbed to the frantic flurry. Piteously, they hopped about the markets and the streets, feet aflame, determined to dance unto death. 

 

Alarmed at these events, the city council sought advice from the physicians who prescribed more dancing as a remedy for hot blood. Hoping that the dancers would tire themselves out, the burghers requisitioned guildhalls, appointed drummers and pipers to provide music, and enlisted the services of professional dancers to urge the sufferers on. The ruse backfired. By August, hundreds more had taken to the streets with delirious dancing, believing themselves cursed by St. Vitus, the patron saint of dancers and epileptics. Eventually, the dancers were bundled onto carts, their feet cajoled into red shoes, and taken to the hillside shrine of St. Vitus to atone for their sins. Thus, after a torturous span of two months, the dancing frenzy finally subsided in September. 

 

The dance plague of 1518 is not a singular occurrence, merely the most popular one. In fact, during the Middle Ages, at least seven other instances of choreomania were reported across Europe. Writing some years after the incident, the Swiss physician and philosopher, Paracelsus explained the mysterious phenomenon of St. Vitus’ Dance as a contagion of imagination that ‘doth not onely fly out of one house into another… but also most swiftly passeth from one City and Country into another, so that by the imagination onely of one person, the Pestilence may come into some whole City or Country.’[1] Though Paracelsus sought physiological explanations behind this deathly dance, considerations of morality weren’t far behind. In fact, he was of the opinion that those who were commonly afflicted were ‘whores and scoundrels who take pleasure in guitar and lute playing… satisfy[ing] all voluptuousness, bodily pleasure, imagination and fancy.’[2] The conflation of dancing with sin is neither restricted to the Middle Ages nor ecclesiastical purview. Echoes of Paracelsus’ prejudice can surely be heard in our own contexts? In what follows, we’ll try to come at the reasons why music and dancing might be viewed as ‘a monopoly of harlots and beggars.’[3]

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CHOREOPOLICE

 

At the heart of neoliberalism lies a glaring paradox. Ostensibly, it appears to be all about free movement, whereas, in actuality, the movement it allows comes severely hamstrung. Simply put, neoliberal societies sanction a specific type of movement pertaining to the capital and its auxiliaries while effectively curtailing all other flows deemed inimical to its scheme. For the purpose of this exhibition, we’ll be locating movement between the opposite poles of ‘police’ and ‘politics,’ following in the footsteps of the dance theorist André Lepecki.[4] 

 

The apparent freedom of movement under neoliberalism is subject to the strictest of control. Indeed, there has been an expansion of the police function in modern-day control societies. No longer limited to the body of the cop, the idea of ‘police’ has become more meta. In the name of security, CCTV cameras have been installed in every corner and alley, and our personal devices have turned into double agents, constantly tracking and reporting our movements. With tentacles of surveillance probing ever deeper into our social networks and private lives, the boundaries of prison seem to have engulfed our entire world. Today, we live and move as if in prison, paranoidly screening all our actions for the tiniest of intransigence. But surely that’s a stretch? Or is it?

 

If neoliberalism had an emblem, it would be those giant gates blocking the entry points to its societies. If you’ve had the misfortune of navigating them late at night as a stranger to the city, you’d probably have some insights into their functioning. What kind of security do these gates and barricades offer and is it worth it, especially when weighed against the inconvenience they pose to unwary wayfarers? Lately, I have been having similar thoughts about the police. In a lecture titled ‘Vulnerability and Resistance’ (2015), Judith Butler notes how political demonstrations must reckon with the cold fact of police presence if not a severe possibility of violence. There’s a heightened awareness among demonstrators that the force instituted to uphold their rights of assembly and peaceful protest may very well turn on them, scattering those freedoms. This is born out of the worrying consistency with which the police have come to disregard time-honoured modes of protest, dispersing, detaining, and brutalising protestors with impunity. Increasingly, one witnesses the police being posed as a threat to those who seek to assert their rights. It makes one wonder whether the police are functioning as an enforcer of law or conformity. Indeed, the police have emerged as the great choreographer of our times, determining how people access and move in space. Its raison d’être is to keep people moving: circulate, or else.

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​The transition from policing to self-policing, far from being a coincidence, has been enabled by concerted and systematic investments in technical infrastructure that allow for unrestricted mining of data and, through it, control. I say this because similar advancements in public distribution technologies, for instance, are still awaited and will likely continue to languish in limbo until a way is found to make them profitable. Or till we start mobilising for change. This brings us to the point of politics. Our neoliberal paradigm can be characterised by an unshakeable antipolitical impulse that seems to have settled deep within our bones. It has led to a confounding of politics with policy. Politics has been removed from the streets and relegated to legislatures. Progressively, it is treated as the exclusive preserve of a privileged class, something that the masses are not allowed to dabble in beyond ritually exercising their voting rights and partaking of several sanctioned choreographies that keep up the appearance of an operational consensus. The relegation of politics to self-serving agents, the privatisation of public goods and dismantling of political platforms, has jeopardised the social contract through a centralisation and corporatisation of power. Thus, what neoliberalism mobilises is not freedom and security but a tolerance for control. 

 

The exercise of freedom within society presupposes certain material supports. When this infrastructure is not forthcoming, actively dismantled or denied, we’re left precarious and at the mercy of those in power. In an article titled ‘Learning from the Virus,’ (2020) the trans-feminist writer Paul B. Preciado drew a picture of the ideal neoliberal subject that emerged from the recent pandemic. Drawing an analogy to the playboy (Hugh Hefner) who worked from his bed, Preciado views the modern individual as a tele-producer and tele-consumer who recedes behind a packet of data and shies away from the public street and square. Indeed, epidemics have a way of foregrounding and furthering latent grids of control. These cartographies inevitably reveal expendable zones peopled by those who’re too old, sick, poor, or simply, insubordinate to yield to its production drills effectively. This is the precariat whose mobilisation and political actualisation has been consistently disabled through a systemic withholding of essential infrastructure. Viewed in this light, disability seems less a factor of bodily difference than of differential distribution of supports across the social body. Bodies rendered bedridden in this way are faced with a critical question: how to move politically in a sickening environment? This echoes the central postulate of Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory (2020): How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHOREOPOLITICS

 

The dance plague of 1518, current research suggests,  was a form of mass hysteria brought on by a mixture of famine, fear of new diseases like syphilis, the plague, smallpox etc., and superstition. This spontaneous outbreak of movement seems to me a natural response to socio-political conditions that had grown claustrophobic and unbearable. Dance plague can thus be considered a defiant mobilisation of despair—a political contagion not of confinement but movement. What appears to be a hysterical movement is, in fact, freedom at work. Freedom requires continuous rehearsing, without which we lose the muscle to move. Far from being a plague, such spontaneous outbursts of motion can be both cathartic and revivifying. They can bring about a reconfiguration of the senses and, through that, a ‘redistribution of the sensible.’[5] These radical movement outbreaks can help us carve a way out of our current impasses. Corporeal improvisations against imposed choreographies. Chorepolitics against choreopolicing. 

 

Miles away from Strasbourg, if more or less around the same time, another woman took to dancing in the streets of Mewar, inviting the opprobrium and ire of her kin. The more they sought to curb her waywardness, the wi(l)der it grew. Exile only had the effect of fanning the flames as the febrile movement spread like wildfire, consuming vast swathes across North India. Popular imagination around these parts retains and reanimates this crazed delirium that seized her limbs, sending her skirt swirling and jewellery flying in abandon. Indeed, Mira’s danced insistence on freedom has mobilised many to dance out of similar sociocultural binds.

 

I like to think of these danced disobediences linked by an innate chorea (an involuntary movement flitting from part to part, body to body, time to time) that itches irresistibly towards freedom. It moves through space and time like a tornado spinning out of control, sweeping up the vicinity in its radically reorganising swirls. It is precisely on account of this swarming, transcending, infectious potential contained in dance that the figure of a lone woman dancing madly through the streets can prove so incandescent. Dance sings forth the resistance of bodies not entirely quelled by colonialism, imperialism, and supremacism. It is the ultimate refuge for the caged other: the feminine, the animal, the colonised, and the institutionalised. When we dance out of turn, we dance in the face of conventions, control, and confinement. We empower ourselves to withdraw from the production of conformity that’s disabling. We mobilise our vulnerabilities to demand crucial support that our bodies need to move politically. So, ‘dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.’ [6]

 

We gratefully acknowledge the various ways in which Namir Al-Nuaimi, Gaurav Chauhan, and Rukhsar have supported the making  of this exhibition.

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[1]  As quoted in Rosalind Jana, ‘The people who “danced themselves to death,”’ on BBC (13 May 2022). https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220512-the-people-who-danced-themselves-to-death [accessed 8 October 2024]

[2]  Ibid. 

[3]  This queer descriptor has stayed with me from a short story read in school. The story titled ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ is authored by Khushwant Singh. 

[4]  The ideas in this exhibition have emerged from a close engagement with Lepecki’s formulations of  ‘choreopolice’ and ‘choreopolitics.’ See André Lepecki, ‘Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer’ in TDR (1988-), Vol. 57, No. 4 (The MIT Press, Winter 2013). 13-27.

[5]  ‘Distribution of the sensible’ is a concept proposed by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière to roughly designate the dominant scheme governing the sociocultural and semiotic sphere at any given point in time.

[6]  As urged by the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. 

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