Reflexivity in Contemporary Dance

An Anthropologist's Notes

Abstract

By juxtaposing some key episodes in the development of contemporary dance and anthropology, I pretend to shed light on a crucial moment in the recent history of the performing arts. After tracking the similarities and differences between postdramatic theatre and what Rudi Laermans proposes to call “dance in general”, I focus on sociocultural anthropology in order to delineate more clearly the kind of reflexivity that unfolds in con­temporary dance works as Jérôme Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2005) and Xavier Le Roy’s Product of Other Circumstances (2009). At the same time, I reconstruct these two works and sound out the reach of a reflexivity that doesn’t operate “from the outside” but “from within”. Moreover, as in both cases a reflexivity is involved that revolves around the problem of alterity, this turns out to be particularly relevant to anthropology itself. At a more general level, I bring to light that the performing arts and the anthropological sciences are converging enterprises.