Community and Choreography: A Reflection on Dance’s Constitutive Outside

The aim of this paper is to take a step backwards. The problem of community in contemporary dance cannot be accurately thought without first looking at dance’s constitutive outside, namely social dancing. This is where most dancing actually happens, but it falls outside the remit of contemporary dance as an artform. And it is a constitutive outside because dance as an artform historically emerged by separating itself off from social dancing, all while remaining bound up with it. In social dancing, the nature of dance is clearly on display: dancing always served community formation and used to be an intrinsic part of life’s most important rituals. But in order to become art, dancing was transformed into “works”, which populate an “imaginary museum” (Goehr) and which transcend the moment of performance so that they can be seen, re-seen and contemplated by an audience. Deprived of its organic embeddedness in communities, dance must now re-connect with societal and ethical issues from within the artificiality of its own medium. I discuss the choreographic strategies of two very different figures, Bronislava Nijinska and Tino Sehgal, who both show an exemplary awareness of the specificity of dance as an artistic medium.