Inquiries into additions and/or modifications of criteria for the perception of 'yijing' in online dance

Introduction

COVID19 and the resultant social distancing mandate around the globe mandated changes to the presentation of dance. Yet, that was not the initiation point of dance videos, live streaming, and exploration into computer-aided dance-making, as these variations to the ‘dance’ understood as the corporeal co-presence of the dancer(s) and the spectator(s), have been around for decades. However, the sharp ascent of online dance presentations triggered urgent inquiries into its relevance to a spectatorship whose presence is limited to the other end of computer screen.

This paper is an extension of the scholar discussion of ‘ArtCross Hong Kong 2022’ (ArtCross), of which one of the three themes of discussion was yijing (意境). The inquiry back then was whether yijing was present in online dance. During the discussion sessions, options of yijing’s English translation have been proposed but no consensus was reached. Neither was it agreed that there existed a counterpart in the English language which aptly reflected in full the aesthetic connotation of yijing. For the lack of a dogmatic equivalent of yijing in the English language, I refer to Gernot Böhme’s paper ‘Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics’, in which his description of ‘atmosphere’ resonates with some of the ways yijing is understood in the Chinese language, the latter presented as follows:

‘意境是指文藝作品中描繪的生活圖景與所表現的思想情感融為一體而形成的藝術境界。特點是景中有情，情中有景，情景交融。凡能感動欣賞者（讀者或觀眾）的藝術，總是在反映物件“境” 的同時，相應表現作者的“意”，即作者能借形象表現心境，寓心境於形象之中。廣義而言，包括作者和欣賞者兩方面。前者由作者的審美觀念和審美評價水準決定，有真與假、有與無、大與小、深與淺之別，後者因欣賞者的審美觀念和審美評價不同而有大小和深淺之分’. [1]

The above definition stipulates a specific requirement for yijing to be associated with reality. It is predominantly a perception to do with our visual faculty. While I argue that yijing does not neatly connote the aesthetic qualities of dance performance, hence my intention of aligning with ‘atmosphere’ in Böhme terms in the remainder of this paper, I am conscious of the increased predominance of visual perception in the making and presentation of online dance compared to dance in theatres. While Böhme has conducted a meticulous analysis of the notion of ‘atmosphere’, for the purpose of this paper, I will, in particular, refer to three attributes he proposed, namely that ‘atmosphere indicates something that is in a certain sense indeterminate,’ [2] ‘the relation between environmental qualities and human states’,[3] and ‘atmosphere is the common reality of the perceiver and the perceived. it is the reality of the perceived as the sphere of its presence and the reality of the perceiver, insofar as in sensing the atmosphere s/he is bodily present in a certain way.’[4] One should note the emphasis on the role of the perceiver and his/her bodily presence. Atmosphere is the result of the sensation of the perceiver, which may be affected but will not be dictated by the creative intention or presentation media.

Before one starts to identify the possible aesthetic qualities in online dance, which may come across to the perceiver as ‘something that is in a certain sense indeterminate,’ there are a number of questions to be asked. The first being what ‘online dance’ entails. ‘At one end of this spectrum is documentation: the recording of a live dance performance. At the opposite end of the spectrum is screendance: the articulation of choreographic ideas completely contingent on the specificities of media space.’ [5] With reference to the choreographic endeavours undertaken in ArtCross, I will limit ‘online dance’ to the followings in this paper:

• Documentary recording of performance, in whole or in parts, play-backed on the Internet after the live performance has finished;
• Synchronic live-streaming of theatre dance to spectators in a locale different from that of the performance;
• Dance made specifically for the medium of the lens, presented as video-recording or live streaming;
• A combination of corporeal movements and computer programming, for example, dance in VR (virtual-reality) and AR (augmented-reality) environments.

Should there be a historical development logic of dance, albeit the plethora of languages, styles and modes of presentation, what comes to mind is the co-presence of the dancing and viewing corporeal bodies in the same architectural space. ‘A performance as any event in which all the participants find themselves in the same place at the same time, partaking in a circumscribed set of activities.’[6] The ephemerality of dance is shared by these corporeal bodies: neither the performing nor the viewing experience can be repeated. The dance can start and end again and again until the physical limit of our corporeality is reached, but each experience is unique as its formation is at the expense of the vanishing of its temporal vessel. However, the historical development logic of dance has been muddled by online dance presentation and spectatorship as the idea of ‘space’ on which the presenter-spectator relationship is developed has been expanded, and the environmental mediation on perception experience has changed from factors such as, but not limited to, brightness, spatial expanse, room temperature and the presence of other people to the speed of Internet connection, monitor screen size, and non-spectatorial activities that are attention-competitive.

Aesthetic consideration of dance has also shifted from that of the generative experience of collective interaction to the question of visual significance. Online dance invites players of other artistic training, hence aesthetic consideration, for example, film directors, to the ‘dance’ making scene. Is online dance an encounter with ‘dance’, an image of ‘dance’, or its archive? Are we witnessing the changing role of the ‘choreographer’ from a tailor of movements to a collector of images?

In the following sections, I will look into how the re-modelled dance spectatorship poses challenges to the discussion of yijing, the aesthetic qualities of which have been deployed generally in the discussion of first, visually-dominant art manifestation and second, the co-presence of the artefact and spectator in the same architectural space.

Where is the dance?

Does online dance ‘take place’ or does it ‘take non-place’, in the anthropologist Marc Ange’s terms? The Internet is a non-place for the impossibility of its entry by our corporeal bodies, hence the impossibility of the reiteration of its affordance through the course of our habitual architectural dependence. It is a non-place also because it is not a destination but a web, literally, of crisscrossing routes that is always on the point of moving onto some ‘place’ else. It is the ‘place of transit which never actually goes anywhere but endlessly refers to other places directly.’[7] In the case of online dance, an event in non-place, we have on one end the spectator’s bodily presence in an architectural space of his/her choice. On the other is the performer’s ‘bodily presence’ as an image on the monitor. When the co-presence of the dancing and viewing corporeal bodies in the same architectural space deems unnecessary, how should one make sense of the ‘atmosphere’ of dance performance as the outwardly perceptible bodily co-presence? How will the laughter, cheers, sighs, tension, to name a few, those deftly described as ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ by dance scholar Fischer-Lichte, be perceivable by the dancer and the spectator? Will the aesthetic reference of dance shift from primarily the kinaesthetic to the visual?

Böhme pointed out that ‘atmospheres are evidently what are experienced in bodily presence in relation to persons and things or in spaces.’[8] Suppose we regard the online dance image as a ‘thing’ in the sense of an artefact of which the spectator experiences. Would that pass for an aesthetic object of the spectator? When following the rehearsal process of Yassmin V. Foster of Middlesex University and her dancers, which is accessible to me as video recordings, I set myself the task of developing a sense of space. By doing so, I was hoping to reject the tendency of regarding these people as merely images. I recorded the date, time, temperature and surrounding noises of my room, the food and drinks I munched, and the duration of video I went through. 

In the meantime, as if supporting my task, I noticed that in the rehearsals, the cameras were always set at the same positions. I wasn’t sure whether it was Foster’s requirement or sheer coincidence, yet, over time, I developed a sense of familiarity with the spatial arrangement of the dancer’s homes, their cats, their house-mates. I even had a sense of the time needed for them to move from one spot to the other. I could almost empathise with their sense of architectural space. But wait. ‘The form of a thing, however, also exerts an external effect. it radiates as it were into the environment, takes away the homogeneity of the surrounding space and fills it with tensions and suggestions of movement.’[9] These images of the dancers and their homes did not come with any volume. Their sizes varied according to the setting of my computer. Their forms weren’t closed, their determinative qualities malleable. What were the ‘tensions and suggestions’ that were influencing me? A new, to-be-defined ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ or the eager waiting of the resume of internet connection so the pixelated image resumes its verisimilitude of a human face?

 

Can truncated bodies dance? 

With the performing bodies unavailable to share the architectural space and ‘flattened’ as images, the spectators must imagine their materiality to which his own resonates. Rosenberg dubs the construction of the dancing body via screen techniques ‘recorporealization.’ By deploying online meeting software, Taiwan choreographer Jeff Hsieh of Anarchy Dance Theatre enables multiple images captured by four cameras in various locations to be synthesized and presented as a collage image to the spectator. Hsieh has done extensive tests on the lens angle, the position of the camera in relation to the dancer in the same room, Internet transmission speed and delays, etc, so that he can ‘cut and stitch’ different body parts of different dancers into a quasi-complete human form. Dancer A’s head on Dancer B’s torso commanding movement of Dancers C and D’s limbs result in a grotesque ‘body’ in action. This choreographic experiment exemplifies online dance as ‘a construction of an impossible body, one not encumbered by gravity, temporal restraints, or death… an exploration of and a re-imagining of the metaphoric and poetic possibilities of the body.’[10] To imagine the corporeality of a truncated body image as such, the spectator attunes to the specificity of dance in its mediated form so as to orient himself. He falls back on the belief in the existence of a complete, living body on the other end of the lens. Instead of the confirmation of a performing body with the spectator’s visual and somatic reception, he turns to his cognitive faculties to complement the visual signals he receives, as he is taught that in most of the cases, a moving hand is attached to a living torso even though the latter is invisible to us. When we look up from the street and see a head move across a window frame, for most of the time we don’t run up the stairs to confirm that there is a pair of legs walking underneath.

One may need a dose of empiricism, at times a large one, to spice up the kinaesthetic perception of online dance. Recorporealization is a matter of the replacement of sensation with cognitive faculties.


Choreographer who? 

While the authorship of dance performance continues to be a topic of debate, for the sake of the discussion in this part, let me assume that there is a single, identifiable author of the artistic output - conventionally known as the choreographer. Notwithstanding the expansion of the technique glossary in contemporary dance, s/he is expected to deal with the aspects of space, composition, movement language and the like which are at the core of live performance. Such parameters, however, are modified in online dance. One is concerned with the two-dimensional frame of the lens instead of three-dimensional architectural space, with movie editing instead of/as composition, while movements are rendered images of movements. When players from artistic disciplines beyond dance, for example film directors, engage themselves in dance-making, the question of intention complicates the matter: what is the difference between a dance video made for dance as the core artistic intent, and that which happens to look like one, for example, a music video with dance movements? How to approach the role of ‘choreographer’ when the dance presentation relies heavily on editing, which is an art language of its own right and exists outside of dance? Is there a difference between the tailoring of somatic movements and the arrangement of movement images? In the experimentation by Gao Shan and Li Qing from the Beijing Dance Academy, we see the ‘dance’ creative process as the collection of movement images and their transformation into visual objects which should be approached, appreciated, or to the least complemented, with aesthetic readings different from those in live dance performance. What have been the defining attributes of live dance performance are insufficient to deal with online dance as one is faced with the question of visual significance instead of the generative experience of collective interaction. If dance is supposed to be identified and appreciated beyond visual terms, how does the detour to images compromise the legitimacy of dance?

 

Dance, is it going to stay? 

Ephemerality has been one of the aesthetic qualities that legitimises dance as an expressive language in its own right, for its intention to be forgotten. The intrinsic value of dance performed live is kinaesthetic and synchronic presence, which ultimately promises life – the living. Movements and choreographic arrangement are the means to that particular end. The lens, on the other hand, is intended to make the dance stay. The mediatized performance, a.k.a. dance made for the lens, is a permanent record inscribed electronically or digitally. Even for live-streamed dance performances, technology has enabled the spectators to produce archives of the dance and watch them again and again, long after the lifespan of the performance has been exhausted.

Is video playback of ‘dance’ dance, or is it an archive of the dance? The accessibility to the ownership of dance on the spectator’s end breaks the promise of scarcity and immediacy of live performances. The ephemerality of dance is a veil which paradoxically exposes, bringing to the fore what is ‘indeterminate’,[11] what the wandering eyes of the spectators fail to catch, and what wants verification which is no longer there. Imagine the insatiable desire of knowing-for-sure. ‘Indeed, exhibition destroys all possibilities for erotic communication. A naked face without mystery or expression – reduced simply to being on display – is obscene and pornographic.’[12] The beauty in the ephemerality of live dance performance lies in the spectator’s awareness of his own unavoidable death as he lays his gaze on that of the disappearance of the dancing Other. The performing and spectating bodies die under the mutual gaze of each other. ‘(Jean-Luc) Nancy argues “that the individual Dasein first knows community when it experiences the impossibility of communion or immanence before the dead other... For if authentic being-toward-death is the condition of Dasein’s knowing itself as existing (that is to say, as transcending, as opening to Being), then it must also be the condition of encountering the other: it is the opening of a relation at the same time that it is the tracing of a singularity.”’[13]

Development or transformation?
This paper picks up from the Artcross inquiry of whether there is the presence of yijing in online dance. Taking reference of the definition of yijing in Chinese, it is associated with reality and is predominantly a perception to do with our visual faculty. I argue that this inquiry is irrelevant to a category of online dance, namely the documentary recording of performance, as dance videos made out of such a need is not a vessel of dance but of the desire of visibility. For the other categories of online dance suggested in the introduction, instead of the internal development of dance, I argue that they are the offspring of intermediation as existing art forms infiltrate into others by virtue of the expansion of technology. As interbreed offspring, they call for the development of new sensibilities and perceptual criteria for them to be approached in their own rights. What is at stake is probably not whether yijing is there in online dance, but other/new notion(s) to help us make sense of the experience. It is yet to be confirmed whether online dance should stay on the trajectory of the historical development of dance, or if it is a transformation of the artform that renders existing appreciation criteria irrelevant. Dance theorist André Lepecki argues for the agency of the ‘witness’ in contrast to that of the spectator, as contemporaries of the performer in the smartphone era. While the spectator searches for information for the sake of non-ambiguity, the witness, ‘the more political and ethical figure of the witness, an actor-storyteller’, is ‘subjective-corporeal-affective-historical.’[14] As language and experience mutually structure and define one another, the uncertainty of the English counterpart of yijing and the suspicion of the need to discuss it at all testifies to the need for renewal of performer-spectator relationship.

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Footnotes:

[1]  https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E6%84%8F%E5%A2%83. The writer’s translation: yijing refers to an artistic realm when the life depiction merges with the ideas and emotions in literary works. it is characterised by the presence of emotion and phenomena in each other, entangled and integrated. For art to move its spectators (readers or audience), it must communicate the author’s intention while representing the reality. It means that the author symbolises his emotions in the images he chooses. Broadly speaking, yijing concerns both the author and the spectators. The author’s aesthetic criteria and judgement determine the quality, and there is the difference between real and fake, existing and non-existing, big and small, deep and shallow. The spectator’s aesthetic criteria and judgement determine the difference between big and small, deep and shallow.

[2] Gernot Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,’ Thesis Eleven, Number 36 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993): 114, DOI: 10.1177/072551369303600107.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 122.

[5] Douglas Rosenberg, ‘Recorporealization and the Mediated Body’, Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image, Oxford Scholarship Online, September 2012, DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199772612.003.0003, p.3.

[6] Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, eds. Minou Arjomand, Ramona Mosse, trans. Minou Arjomand (NY: Routledge: 2014), p.18.

[7] Quoted by T. Cresswell, ‘Place’, Elsevier, 2009.

[8]  See Note 1, 119.

[9] Ibid., 121.

[10] Douglas Rosenberg, ‘Recorporealization and the Mediated Body’, Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image, Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2012, DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199772612.001.0001, p.3-4.

[11] See note 2.

[12] Byung-chul Han, The Agony of Eros, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 32.

[13] Christopher Fynsk, ‘Experiences of Finitude’ in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (U.S.: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. xv-xvi.

[14] Lepecki, André. 2016. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London: Routledge, 173.