michael j. morris

This fall I am creating a new dance work in the Department of Dance at Denison University. This is both my first semester as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison and the first dance I have choreographed with these students. At the moment, the working title of the project is becoming becoming becoming, drawing from a range of references, but specifically borrowing language from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—their concepts of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and becoming-imperceptible. These are concepts that I have previously explored in a burlesque solo entitled becoming emma, becoming imperceptible. In that piece, I worked with a minimal set of vocabularies through which my body passes: first, eroticized feminine gestures from a burlesque idiom—the grind, the shimmy—then more remote idealized femininity embodied in a balletic idiom—bourrées in fifth position, undulating arms that directly cite Fokine’s Dying Swan and Petipa/Ivanov’s Swan Lake—and finally, in my most exposed state of undress, rolling and crawling that evokes something nonhuman, something insect or creature. The balletic swan is an interesting transitional figure between the eroticized feminine and the animal: she is femininity becoming more unattainable, more rarified, but also more animal, less fully human. I think the choreography offers a proposition regarding the parameters of femininity, the erotic, and the human—where they intersect, where they dissolve, and how they move through a single body.

For this new work, I am considering similar ideas with some of the same references across a larger cast. At the moment, I will be working with twelve dancers. With this group, I will continue to interrogate a range of mechanisms through which culturally specific idealized femininities are produced, reproduced, circulated, and potentially deconstructed or deterritorialized. While working with some of the vocabulary I began to explore with becoming emma, becoming imperceptible, I am interested in investigating the movement/choreographic idiom of the fashion runway—the style of walking, the usually straight-and-narrow spatial pathways, the understated presentationalism of people just walking in order to be looked at, and how they figures subject/object positionalities—alongside continuing to work within a limited ballet vocabulary and movement derived from the nonhuman animal. I am also interested in how these vocabularies and references can be spatialized in relation to one another, as both states and spatial territories through which bodies pass. I’m interested in exploring how these spatialities are positioned in relation to viewers and in relation to particular geometries. One way this might be addressed is arranging the audience on four sides, where their seats demarcate the edges of a plane and the intersecting sight lines extrude a grid. Bodies then might move along this grid, conforming to straight lines and right angles, or they might move across the grid, in ways that do not conform to its logic. These are concepts that I began to explore in some ways in TOWARD BELONGING, a group work that I premiered in April 2015. As with that piece, I will also be investigating repetition as both a choreographic device and a fundamental property of the ontology of gender. Following Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, we can think of gender as an ongoing activity rather than a state of being, a set of stylized behaviors and acts that are repeated incessantly, producing the effect of their own persistence and stability. Thus, the references of which this piece may be composed include philosophy, multiple movement idioms/traditions through which the feminine and the human/nonhuman are produced (fashion, ballet, etc.), my own previous choreographic work, and abstract concepts like the grid, repetition, and spatialized territories—which are, of course, already politicized in our lived experiences of them.

Here I would like to start to aggregate some specific textual, choreographic, and visual references for the work. I have collected a few different passages of text and videos that will inform my process.

If I can secure permission, I am also hoping to include recorded spoken text by Juliana Huxtable, originally written for the Hood By Air Fall/Winter 2014 runway show (video above), which addresses a range of body ideals in relation to gender:

Lastly, these passages from and discussing the work of Deleuze and Guattari are informing this process, and it may be that recorded readings of these passages also become part of the final work:

“In [Deleuze and Guattari’s] view, the binary couple Man/Woman is one of the interlocking sets of coordinates on the categorical grid defining the person. They correspond to Nobody. They are empty categories. ‘Woman’ is simply the oppositional term without which ‘Man’ would have no meaning. It is simply that in contrast to which what is designated ‘Man’ is deemed superior. It is a patriarchal construct … No real body ever entirely coincides with either category. A body only approaches its assigned category as a limit: it becomes more or less ‘feminine’ or more or less ‘masculine’ depending on the degree to which it conforms to the connections and trajectories laid out for it by society according to which coordinate in gender grid it is judges to coincide with. ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ as such have not reality other than that of logical abstractions … ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ and their many subcategories designate stereotyped sets of object choices and life paths (stable equilibriums) promoted by society. They are clichés that bodies are coerced into incarnating as best they can. No body is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’ One can only come to one’s assigned cliché, like metal to a magnet that recedes father into the distance the closer one draws, in an endless deflection from invention. The only end is death. Gender is a fatal detour from desire-in-deviation (every body’s secret potential and birthright) … A body does not have a gender: it is gendered. Gender is done unto it by the socius … Gender is a form of imprisonment, a socially functional limitation of a body’s connective and transformational capacity. Although thoroughly social, gender is not of course arbitrary in the sense that bodies are assigned categories at random. Gendering is the process by which a body is socially determined to be determined by biology: social channelization cast as destiny by being pinned to anatomical difference” (Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, 86-87).

“The feminine gender stereotype involves greater indeterminacy (‘fickle’) and movement (‘flighty’) and has been burdened by the patriarchal tradition with a disproportionate load of paradox (virgin/whore, mother/lover). Since supermolecularity involves a capacity to superpose states that are ‘normally’ mutually exclusive, Deleuze and Guattari hold that the feminine cliché offers a better departure point than masculinity for a rebecoming-molecular of the personified individual. They therefore recommend what they call ‘becoming-woman’ for bodies of either biological sex. Becoming-woman involves carrying the indeterminacy, movement, and paradox of the female stereotype past the point at which it is recuparable by the socius as it presently functions, over the limit beyond which lack of definition becomes the positive power to select a trajectory (the leap from the realm of possibility into the virtual—breaking away)” (Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 87).

“Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects or form that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or by habit. If this is true, then we must say the same of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities (although it is possible—only possible—for the woman or child to occupy privileged positions in relation to these becomings). What we term a molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject. Becoming-woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it. We are not, however, overlooking the importance of imitation, or moments of imitation, among certain homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a real transformation on the part of certain transvestites. All we are saying is that these indissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be understood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman. We do not mean to say that a creation of this kind is the prerogative of the man, but on the contrary that the woman as a molar entity has to become-woman in order that the man also becomes- or can become-woman” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 275-276).

“The question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body—the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is stolen first from the girl: Stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her. The boy’s turn comes next, but it is by using the girl as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire, that an opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too. The girl is the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and a trap. That is why, conversely, the reconstruction of the body as a Body without Organs, the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman, or the production of a molecular woman” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 276).

“…it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all other becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 277).

“If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 279).

“A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points. A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. … A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 293).

“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segement by segment, have a small plot of land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a Body without Organs” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 161).