Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. [1]
Pina Bausch
How can we live? (…) How can we dance today? [2]. These are the questions that struck Pina Bausch, a major figure in contemporary dance at the end of the 20th century, and her singularly daring way of working. When composing a new choreography, she asked all sorts of questions of her dancers, who responded with gestures that light-up their creations. According to Pina, ‘what there is to say is less important than what is in question.’ She wanted to make the life-force within us speak through the act of dancing.
In this issue of OMBILIC the clinical finesse of Sonia Chiriaco’s text, Mysterious Desire, has transported my imagination towards the style of Pina Bausch. In each of the family compositions that she underscores, a new dance emerges each time with unexpected results for which “no prediction can be made.”
Despina Andropoulou introduces us to a Freud who in 1898 expressed the wish that procreation should be elevated to the condition of voluntary and intentional action. She invites us to go through the different stages of the separation between procreation and sexual relations in scientific laboratories. For Despina, co-parenting would elide the possibility of bringing to life the Lacanian aphorism that there is no sexual relation. The family would be founded on the basis of asexual identities.
She brings us back to desiring movements by recalling Miller’s text, Lacanian Biology, where he indicates that no human being, from the moment he speaks, can avoid the trauma of the shock of language on the body, which sets us up again and again for a new dance.
The interview with Jurist, Jean-Aymeric Marot, invites a new movement and presents the engineering of the human germ-line as a question of democracy: what kind of dignity can provide a framework for the advances in genetics? How do bioethics and international conventions position themselves in the face of objective and subjective conceptions of human dignity? Modern genetic techniques are increasingly present in our daily lives. How far can we go? Pipol 10 places this debate front and centre!
And to conclude, Sergio Zabalza invites us to explore the title of our congress “Wanting a child?” with a Lacanian overture to the possibilities of new interpretations. “Wanting a non-child?” According to the author it would be worth asking how many families, couples or individuals are clear about what they want when they bring a child into the world. This is where the analytical operation finds its field of intervention: in the overture to that which is mysterious, unheralded, to that which fails. Indeed, is it that which fails that permits us to dance again and again?
Happy Reading.
Translation: Raphael Montague
Review: Caroline Heanue
Photography: Danseur : P. Couchard – © F. Beitzel
Bibliography
Lacan, J., “Note on the Child,” in The Lacanian Review/Hurly-Burly, ‘Family Dramas, Family Traumas,’ Issue 04, Winter 2017, p. 13-14.
[1] Pina, Documentary Film by Wim Wenders, Germany, 2011, DVD edition by France Télévisions Distribution.
[2] Fontaine G., “Sur le fil: Pina Bausch, Café Müller,” (2018), Dances of Time – Research on the concept of time in Contemporary Dance, Les Editions du Réel, p. 185.
