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In order to understand the way how Pina Bausch’s choreographic method contributes to the deterritorialization of the city it is necessary to ask ourselves beforehand: what is a city, afterall?

The tendency to respond to this question primarily in terms of a space that is occupied and shared (geography and architecture) has been effaced throughout the past century by theories that add to the understanding of the concept of a city the notion of bodies in movement as one of the primarily layers (Mumford; de Certeau; Sennet). Lefbvre, for example, argued that space is not a physical constraint but is historically produced by how people embed it with meaning through daily activities. For him there is the preexisting space, the natural physical phenomena, but also the absolute space, the historical space, the abstract space and the space yet to come, all are interconnected and overlapped in a certain way. (Lefebvre, Kofman et al. 1996).

With the sedimentation of the notion that cities are a lot more than their architectural ensemble, they are practiced spaces, the project of the city defined by the movement of its inhabitants has been explored in researches about daily life in many areas, such as architecture, geography and political science, and it finds developments in all artistic areas.

Since modernism, collectives like The Situationist International, the Futurists and Fluxux, among other artists groups, some one of them were already named in Corpocidade, like Flávio de Carvalho with his walks defying the morally accepted standards of São Paulo society in the 30’s and Arthur Barrio and his version of derivee, have been exploring the city as their predominant working material. In those pieces, the encounter shaped by the artist with the public space, and with the other as consequence,  claims the political dimension of the relationship between any individual and the city space, which would be a place of behavioral contamination and, therefore, where political, ethical and aesthetic spheres would meet.

Pina Bausch, German choreographer who distinguished herself for the creation of the contemporary dance style known as dance theater, has been exploring affects between the body and the city in a series of works she’s created in various countries around the world. After developing Nur Du, inspired by her visits to the American West, and in partnership with local cultural Institutions the TanzTheater Wuppertal had residencies in Hong Kong where they’ve created Der Fenster Putzer, in Brazil, Água, in Lisbon, Masurca Fogo. Rome, Palermo, Budapest. Nefés, the piece dedicated to Istanbul, premiered in 2003 and was co-produced by the International Istanbul theatre Festival and this city’s Foundation for Culture and Arts.

This article does not wish to become a critique to Bausch’s work, instead it rather borrows the artist’s practice and through Nefés, elaborated some reflections about the intersection between the city and the discoursive possibilities contained in that meeting.

Bausch’s compositions extrapolate the representation of the cities visited by the company and defend the idea that the body is (and I emphasize the verb to be) many cities simultaneously. The scenic body results from and also promotes the deterritorialization of the contemporary urban space.

When we think about dance and the city, we see today two major practices: one that deals with dance in the city, that is, using the outdoor spaces as an extension of the stage (arguably called site-specific actions). In this case, what is modified by the action of the dancer is the way of inhabiting a given space during the show. The site is support and/or scenery for the action. What the performance moves is a pattern of body movements. The body moves space.

The other one would be what I call Collector: it catalogues. In such pieces, the creator is inspired by and gathers elements from the city, habitual movements, for the creation of choreographic combinations destined for the stage, transporting movements that take place in the urban chaos and daily life to the inside of the theater. In this case, it is space that moves, transported in spatial practices through the body of the dancer to another physical limit. Space is moved in the body.

Pina Bausch’s series of works on cities could be easily categorized among the last one, except for one small detail, which particularly grabbed my attention as a spectator: Pina does not move patterns gathered for the stage only. More than representing allegories of city she visited, she elaborates a collection of affects that invent a site that can only exist through the performer’s body.

In Nefés, Bausch organizes an alternative to the solidification of a city through affects and collects movements that may not have taken place or do not refer directly to that city. The choreographer stated that this series comes out of her wish to discover the essence of places and, as a consequence, the audience realizes throughout the show that the essence is not in the places, but in the visitors and in the way they land the spaces in their bodies.

But what does it mean to consider a city through affects? Elizabeth Grosz defines affects not as an effect of consciousness but as “torsions of the body itself” (Grosz 1995). The city’s identity is folded into body and the spatial perception is folded into affect. In Nefés we see the idea that affects are created from movement and from exchanges ad infinitum with the passing space. Alfred North Whitehead and his concept of negative prehensions help us understand the way the space is composed in the body through a collage of places that are beyond what the body sensorially perceives from its immediate surroundings.

Negative prehensions are, according to Whitehead, what we apprehend from the world, but it drives our attention to something else, what it perceives, but is excluded from the momentary space-time constitution (Whitehead 1960). For him, the encounter with an object (object here can mean another individual, the city or any entity that perceptionally informs the body in space) can become an event. A transformation movement is an event. In Whitehead’s thinking “there is a denial of the ontological difference between what we call mental objects and subjective acts. When he agrees with William James in rejecting a duality between thinking and things” (Shaviro) he allows us to understand the city as something that extrapolates the physicality parameters to be something that is spatially signified. The meaning, or what Whitehead calls Nexus, is a momentary togetherness that is dissolved in the fraction after it takes place. The city only has Nexus when it is signified in the body and vice-versa.

That is the Istanbul represented by Pina Bausch, the one that comes out of the volatile encounter between the collector dancers and the architectural surface, between gestures captured from the collective spaces and the ones taken from individual memories. The relationship with the city is not primarily perceptive, it is invented in a continuousness of encounters, potentially of events.

Environment and body as two inseparable entities is also one of the main ideas in the theories of architects and philophers Arakawa and Madalaine Gins (Gins 2002). For them, the city does not host the body. Radically, according to the theory, the city does not exist. Actually, it exists only in moments of landing. Getting back to our initial question, “what is a city?”: for them the city is not, it fulfils itself and acquires nexus in being in the other, in Whitehead’s togetherness. In an interesting way, aligned with Bausch’s composing process, in their theory, there is no hierarchy between perceptive landing spaces and imaginary ones. They explain: “the exterior world is always there to provide us that which we may be compelled to remember and thus it liberates memory from accompanying the immediate space around us. Memory is qualified to expand because it does not need to remember what is right there, being able to revisit the present at any instant” (Gins 2002). Thus the body can land in other spaces, places that are recollected and evoked from a given physical encounter, but are not equally determining in our perception and spatial configuration.

When I describe Pina Bausch’s cities as being primarily elaborated with affects, I do not mean emotional affect, but the one Deleuze describes and pre-perceptive. Affects are those “virtual kinesthesia anchored on and functionally limited by what is updated”, but that extrapolates that which it incorporates (Massumi 2002). Nefés is an example of how the body invents the city through a sequence of landing spaces and how affects unfold spatial perception (and not otherwise). On stage there are events in which the dancer’s body overlaps landing spaces and deterritorializes the presence. A body updated in Istanbul becomes Istanbul, even if it is in the theater.

The body/being, this organism that personifies itself (Arakawa & Gins), gives a peculiar characteristic to the city. It perceives, experiences and appropriates space, apprehends, selects and attentively draws on the surface of the city another space-time layer: in speed, routes, paths, occupations. They are two moving bodies, one is more volatile than the other. According to Certeau’s description (Certeau 1988), the city is created from the encounter, from the invention of a unique and ephemeral point of view that transforms it spatially (93).

Bausch states she is not interested in how people move, but what moves them. She investigates what moves a body and how a body can conceptually move the pre-conception the audience has about that city.

For those who are restless, I must say I avoid here the description of scenes, searching for signification or even regarding Nefés as spatial metaphors. For me, this piece is a collection of presences, going along the line of that which Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht describes as presence effect (Gumbrecht 2004), if its signification is not exactly indescribable, it is uninteresting in the very least. Presence is what makes space became elastic and to transcend its material limits according to tendencies and intentionality vectors.

Bausch demolishes the notion that the city and the body configure two autonomous architectures that relate with each other, that border each other, but do not overlap, and she delivers the concept of the city to the movement of the body.

Nefés is not site-specific (Kwon 2002) because, although it refers to a given place, from the moment the affects of the dancers and a re-collection of images are at stake, that is presences, the very notion of site as a static body is dismantled. There is nothing specific in a place that pre-exists the movement of the body. A city changes as it lands in each body.

Nefés is a city by itself.

In the direct reference to the Hamam, the Turkish bath, even in these cases the piece focus on a peculiar aspect: the bath as social center that provides a collective experience of the body. The shared space is the place where difference is experienced within predefined patterns of behaviors. One of the dancers presents himself speaking loudly “this is me in the Hamam” in the front part of the stage, the audience is confronted with a body reproducing a determined posture, assumed in a specific location. He points to himself: this is me there (and not here). Soon other dancers take the stage and as they lose themselves between gestures that point out to other bodies while still repeating the “this is me…” indicating that all bodies that share the same space become mixed up and the self and the other become interchangeable. The other becomes a reflection of the self. Any body could be in this body, when a space for collective intimacy is shared. In the same space: the same body.

Soon after, half of the dancers on stage lie on the floor while their pairs stand by them and use a traditional cheesecloth, that is wet with soap and blown with breath. Hands slide over the soap ballon in order to deflated the fabric, while the bubbles drip on the floor cover the lying body. What one exhales covers the physical presence of the other.

One can imagine that, since it is based on the dancer’s free association of collections from the public space, one of the most common critiques to her work is a supposed lack of commitment with the cities, such as in Joan Acocella’s text, published in New Yorker Magazine:

“In fact, she rarely took the target city very seriously. You would never have known that ‘Palermo Palermo’ was about Palermo, or that the other pieces were about the other places, if the title or the musical choices—sometimes just the advertising—hadn’t tipped you off”

This critique denotes how the other is still expected to inform what a given city is, before the visit. Rather than presence, one whishes the predictable: the comfort of recognizing and not the discomfort of re-collecting, which implicates destabilization and deterritorialization of what is constructed as one´s own body. In over two hours of choreography, Bausch keeps interconnecting interior and exterior, individual and collective experiences, past and present places, virtual and actual encounters and the subject and the city become nomad entities.

As she compiles a collection of physical states in her choreographies, the dancers become more than just witnesses of a city and become the very body of the city. History, architecture, quotidian legends and myths, individual memories and acquired physical vocabularies merge in the transfer of the city to the stage, or rather, transforming the stage into a city.

The many short sequences that compose the choreography are relational games. A stolen kiss, a partner who holds pillows and portrays the suspension caused by the generosity of giving oneself up. When a mother is constantly present between two lovers, when a men holds a little girl as high as he can, so she can reach a box of candies hidden in the end of the stage. When a dancer tries in vain to protect a woman from public exposure, even tough she is indifferent to the exposure of her body through a torn dress; there is a sensual pleasure in being together, in togetherness, which gives nexus to the shared space. The city is the possibility of the encounter.

Bausch works in the thin line between the comical and the violent, which many times causes uneasiness. Exactly for dealing with ethical and moral issues in that line, she is able to reach the audience through affects and transform the experience of Nefés in an experiential tonality of the city. That is only possible because what is danced is what cannot be said, it is the intensity of the event, the movement of what cannot be represented, the content of a city that is corporeal experience.

The abundance of gestures from Bharata Natyam, the emphasis on the hands and arms while we never see the female’s legs, covered with their night dresses, repetition and permanence, suspension, transference of sequences by a duo that later contaminate the gestures of the entire company, the multiplication of bodies, chains and cuts.

In Nefés, Bausch is able to disrupt memory, to ask the audience to call upon familiarities and recognitions in a city that occupies Istanbul to exist during the performances. As the show reaches its end, the audience may even feel a little more intimate with the city, but Bausch’s greatest accomplishment is being able to guide us through spaces that cannot be mapped or turned into World Heritage property and that are geographically inexistent.

In the end, what we re-collect after watching Nefés are affects: that which allows being here and there simultaneously. Knowing a city is based on kinesthesia, it depends on lapses, walks, running and touch, all this happens within the theater and when the show ends, each one of us becomes a sigh from Istanbul.

Bibliographic references:

Certeau, M. d. (1988). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Gins, A. a. M. (2002). The Architectural Body. alabama, the university of alabama press.

Grosz, E. A. (1995). Space, time, and perversion : essays on the politics of bodies. New York, Routledge.

Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004). Production of presence : what meaning cannot convey. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.

Kwon, M. (2002). One place after another : site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Lefebvre, H., E. Kofman, et al. (1996). Writings on cities. Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell.

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual : movement, affect, sensation. Durham [N.C.] ; London, Duke University Press.

Mumford, L. (1996). What is a City? The City Reader. R. T. L. and and F. Stout. London + New York, Routledge: 183-188.

Sennett, R. (1994). Flesh and stone : the body and the city in Western civilization. New York, W.W. Norton.

Whitehead, A. N. (1960). Process and reality, an essay in cosmology. New York, Harper.

Bianca Scliar Mancini is a dance researcher and  doctor candidate at Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities na Concordia University, Montreal.