Gesture
Adam Hulbert, Sound Art
Gesture as the coming together of intention and flow in an unbroken movement, in response to external forces or limitations. For me, free improvisation is at its most satisfying when I complete the gesture, whether or not I know its trajectory from the onset. A gesture is incomplete when attention moves away from flow, or completed when intention moves on deliberately.
Gesture can be action, or attention: these both involve the interplay of intention and movement. In his ‘Analog Aphorisms’, Todd Barton notes the sonic universes that can come into being with the very slow turning of a single knob; he also talks of an instrument that “follows the curve of my imagination.”
Gesture plays with scale. It can be the shaping of a single note or the sustained response of a body to gravity. A gesture can, in turn, be modulated (see modulation).
Erin Brannigan, Dance
I would argue for intermediality as a condition of dance, and gesture - in its ‘medial’ form - as an important practical and conceptual motif for unpacking this condition. Looking at the writing of Bela Balazs, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Francois Lyotard on gesture as a medial modality?
• A focus on means rather than ends
• Which shines a light on the medium in question, drawing attention to its processes and materialities
• In being thus self-reflexive the gesture expands, exposes, reveals and exhibits a means beyond pre-existing formulations of the same
• This can involve rehabilitation, recuperation, reinvention; a return to a place of provenance
• And this opens on to its discursive facet, its call for response, participation, collaboration…
• Finally, it requires movement to fulfill its operations
Returning to my ‘home’ discipline, a final theorist in this geneology of gesture as an aesthetic concept, is Hubert Godard. Godard works across the fields of dance studies, movement analysis or kinesiology, rehabilitation and biomechanics here in France. Godard makes the link between gesture and the experimental work of contemporary dance. He describes the charter of contemporary dance as a project ‘not in search of a model, but a profoundly original gesture, breaking with the previous cognitive order and semantics.’ (1) He brings Delsarte’s scientific approach in the 19th century to his taxonomy of gestures up-to-date with his description of the provenance of gestural production, describing what he calls the ‘pre-gestural zone’. Godard describes this evasive source of movement in his description of movement “starters”:
One inevitably goes back to the mystery of what happens before the movement: what body image? what geography? what history? and above all, what intentionality? The pre-movement is an empty zone … and yet everything is already played out there, the entire poetic charge and tonal colouring of the action. A brief passage, a low pressure trough corresponding to this wholly founding moment: the gestural anacrusis.
(2)
(2)
Godard describes here the moment immediately prior to movement that is rich with potential. It is informed by the individual’s body image, their sense of corporeal geography and history, and an intentionality that can have a variety of sources (such as words, images and music). Here and elsewhere in Godard’s writing it is the nature of the founding moment which determines the gesture; its tone, ‘colour’ and poetic. The emphasis in Godard on the provenance and formulation of a gesture reiterates the focus on the ‘means’ or media in Agamben’s medial gestures. This zone or ‘passage’ so rich with potential but prior to a recognizable ‘colour’ or ‘tone’ is the place that contemporary dance can sometimes occupy; suspending, extending and reflecting on the gesture in process, as a means without end.
1. Laurence Louppe, “Singular, Moving Geographies: an interview with Hubert Godard,” Writings on Dance: The French Issue no. 15 (Winter, 1996b): 17. My emphasis.
2. Idem. My emphasis.