12 Dec 2009

'What Makes Dance : From Plasticity to Performance' - just out from publishers La Part de l'Œil

'What Makes Dance : From Plasticity to Performance'
La Part de l'Œil n° 24 - 2009

256 pages, size 21x29.7 cm
64 b/w ill., 19 full colour ill.
ISBN 978-2-930174-40-2

This volume strives to elicit an aesthetics of creation, of the creative act, starting at once from the latest attempts on the part of dance to provide itself with a space for thinking and from the numerous interchanges between the fields of dance and plasticity, both of which are confronted with the notions of form and figure, and for instance with the relations between movement and line or trace. The title of Michel Guérin's contribution probably sums up best this volume's purport : 'Of a Dancing of Art', postulating as it does that dance 'is the matrix paradigm as it were of all aesthetic forms of behaviour', and thus provides the scheme required by any poietics of the arts. It will therefore come as no surprise that references to Ravaisson, Bergson and Valéry, among others, should come up in this connection.

A number of topoi are also revisited here : in a splendid paper Rémi Labrusse takes up again the tangled question of Matisse's relationship with dance; Chaké Matossian investigates Fernand Léger's relationship with dance and the ballet; Luc Richir captures Camille Claudel's about-turn, while other authors handle the close relationship that dance establishes with plasticity whenever dance becomes performance.

The appearance of this singularly topical volume coincides with the publication of books by Véronique Fabbri (Paul Valéry, le poème et la danse, Herrmann, Paris, August 2009), Edwige Phitoussi (La figure et le pli — Degas, Danse, Dessin de Paul Valéry, L'Harmattan, Paris, June 2009) and Frédéric Pouillaude (Le désœuvrement chorégraphique. Étude sur la notion d'Œuvre en danse, Vrin, Paris, March 2009) : all three have provided contributions to this volume of La Part de l'Œil.