Inglês (pdf)
Artigo em XML
Referências do artigo
Tradução automática
Enviar este artigo por email
Citado por SciELO 
Similares em
SciELO 
Permalink
‘Horientation’ towards
To start with, as in many cases, it is important to establish a common plane for the reader and the writer, a plane that turns into places of happenstance. This plane is plastic, capable of expanding and proposing new ways to encounter and be encountered. New significations appear while concepts turn, themselves, into places of encounter, or affect. What I propose, with this first encounter, is to build, to edify some fluxes around the concepts of dance, education, and creation. We know that choreographic creation, due to its complexity and diversity, does not have a specific direction (Fazenda, 2012). Therefore, I will not draw a direction; instead, what I propose is to think of a ‘horientation’. A horizon that establishes a possible view, a horizontal vision that, at the same time, guides. In this sense, guiding does not mean establishing a path, but proposing the journey and an encounter, in the sense of thinking about the possibilities of becoming. This text intends to establish a dialogue between some key concepts activated by Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 1987, 2003), in some of their body of work, and to think about the points of connection that could be established with choreographic creation and education. Where, inspired from their view, I trace a map, a geographical topography, that link those subjects in the realm of artistic education.
Deleuze and Guattari are important references not only to think about culture, and artistic creation, but also about education, specifically, artistic education. This relation is present in many texts, as Masny (2013), Jagodzinski (2016) or Carlin and Wallin (2014) show us. But I’ll bring Semetsky (2006) to establish this link, where she articulates John Dewey’s anti-dualism with Gilles Deleuze’s rhizome. From this ground, she draws a map of rhizomatic connections, where
This metaphor (the rhizome), by being used with regard to the question of sources of knowledge in the context of philosophy of education, permits a shift of focus from the static body of knowledge to the dynamic process of knowing1, with the latter’s having far-reaching implications for education as a developing and generative practice. (Semetsky, 2006, pp. xxi-xxii)
This immanent movement, in the process of knowing, is a key element to think in between choreography and artistic education. The idea of a dynamic process of knowing, echoes perfectly in what a choreographic process has the potential to be, viewed as a developing and generative practice, not only in the generation of choreographic material, but also, educational development. This core opens a line of discussion around the subjects that I want to develop, it unfolds the map that I am drawing with you. This action of ‘drawing’ becomes an operating concept, it’s not an innocent word that I am referring to. It has two main issues underlying it. The first is what Brian Massumi, a former translator of Deleuze, states in his translation of A thousand plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987),
to draw is an act of creation. What is drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of flight) does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word tracer captures this better: It has all the graphic connotations of "to draw" in English, but can also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. "To trace" (decalquer), on the other hand, is to copy something from a model. (p. xvi)
Drawing led us to the realm of creation, to the act of doing as an act of knowing, to create a trail in the act. This topographical metaphor is important to this text, it will be developed further with Masschelein (2010) with the action of walking in the street to train the gaze. The second issue I want to address, is to think of the concept of machine, or a set of machines, developed by Deleuze and Guattari (2003) and its relation with their concept of minority (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) in the context of choreographic creation. This ‘horientation’ is, intentionally, a mistake, or rather, it is an assumption of an error, a metaphor for the uncertainty in the process of looking at a horizon and following a direction. This idea of geography echoes in what Deleuze says about becoming, which, as we have seen, exists in geography, mapping, tracing,
We think too much in terms of history, whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits. (…) There is a philosophy-becoming which has nothing to do with the history of philosophy and which happens through those whom the history of philosophy does not manage to classify. (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 2)
I propose that there is an intrinsic becoming in the choreographic process because of this idea of ‘horientation’. This idea, this error, this myth, encapsulates two strong spheres that I would like to address. Meaning, the idea of horizontality in the process of dance making where the active agents of creation, usually interpreter-student and choreographer-teacher, both contribute to the choreographic work. And, on the other hand, the orientation, the way the teacher guides the students, or the choreographer conducts the artistic process. These were two sub issues that I focused on in previous texts (Neto, 2021a, 2021b) but they are present here, underlying this one.
As I mentioned before, in this work, I am focused on this oriented writing, in this attempt to follow and create a trail, a dust trail, because it is continually in a process of revolution and sedimentation. I intend to think about the process of creation as a bigger place of encounter or a bigger machine for minority. Like the action of drawing an arrow on a dusty floor. To think about creation is to draw a meaningless vector, without permanence, but with infinite intensity. A vector parallel to history, parallel to the personal and universal sphere. I propose to think of a strange entity, a transitory instance that can be called becoming-creation. This becoming-creation encapsulates an error, a set of inaccuracies, but which, for now, are essential to understand the vision of choreographic creation. I do not intend to approach creation from the inside, I intend to think about the surface of creation, to think about the surface that operates the exchange, an important place for Deleuze. On this surface there is an inclination, to such orientation, in the geography of becoming. It is about thinking the vector, the intensity of this process of leaning and how it establishes another way of looking, a difference. This time I go beyond the agents, I de-personify humanity, in the sense of minority, of the common, of what is not alone.
Towards a minor machine
As a way of locating the reader, I am writing in the context of contemporary choreographic creation in the scope of contemporary dance. In general, dance, as an artistic appearance, has a profound ability to reflect on the reality and sociocultural experience of individuals (Fazenda, 2012; Louppe, 2012). In the specific case of theatrical dance, it emphasizes the choreography-audience and dancer-choreographer relationship in the construction of a performance defined by artistic motivations and certain aesthetic assumptions (Fazenda, 2012). This relationship plane returns us to a framework of creation in which the choreographer, dancer, and thinker, invents not only a performance aesthetic, but a body, a practice, a theory, a motor language. (Louppe, 2012). In this text, I decided to replace the word ‘dancer’ with ‘interpreter’, as Fazenda (2012) states, because there is an important role of the dancer in the process of dance-making. In this sense, I'm not interested in thinking about creation as a stable instance, a technology that replicates itself. But rather, as a process of generating towards the idea of multiplicity. This capacity creates an idea of autonomy in the creative process or, as I state previously, its own resistance. Where relations inside the process of creation open its own space, its own geography, its own little world,
through the space that the work of art opens, it becomes possible to think about its existence in the educational context. It was necessary to trace a path from the surface of concepts to the paradoxical relationship between art and education, in order to see artistic education as a place of artistic practice. This, in turn, is a practice that cannot be at the service of a pedagogical purpose or follow a methodological structure, but which, by its mechanism of resistance, opens new worlds in the School. Disarticulation is configured as the point of relationship between art and education and allows, as a paradoxical movement, to reflect on the problematization of artistic practice in the educational context. (Neto, 2021a, p. 67)
What I want to think, at this point, is what comes from this kind of disarticulation where Education is a horizon, that establishes a view, not what should be seen. The concept of machine is operative in this autonomy.
Machine, machinism, 'machinic': this does not mean either mechanical or organic. Mechanics is a system of closer and closer connections between dependent terms. The machine by contrast is a 'proximity' grouping between independent and heterogeneous terms (topological proximity is itself independent of distance or contiguity). What defines a machine assemblage is the shift of a center of gravity along an abstract line. (…) The machine, in requiring the heterogeneity of proximities, goes beyond the structures with their minimum conditions of homogeneity. (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 104)
The machine consists of a system of connections, the transfer of a center of gravity along the machine allows the machine to define itself. The machines I summon in my creation processes follow a similar logic. A machine, or set of machines, follows an internal production direction in the process. A machine can be a generator of movement, a specific movement that results from the passage of a center of gravity along an invisible and abstract line. A machine is a production mechanism that is generated from the materials of creation. The choreographic creation opens its own space, maintained by the ‘endoconsistency’ of the process. Machines exist associated with this ‘endoconsistency’, they exist as extensions of this consistency. I often think that my role in the creation process involves looking for and to machines, rather than looking for the work of art or any aesthetic or pedagogical concerns. It is the machine that generates more materials, machines that surpass the creators. This power, in sharing power with machines, opens a new space, a space where I can be a spectator of what is created. A distance that the machine allows. In this way, Deleuze refers to the machine as a proximity grouping of ‘man-tool-animal-thing’, reaffirming its ability to relate, to create an abstract line that makes us work together. The orientation of these machines is given by the abstract line, a kind of rail that makes a center of gravity slide. I propose that this center, the place where all forces act, can be seen as a gravitational center, a center that allows a small orbit within the consistency of the process of creating. We cannot forget that, in this text, it is not important to look for an essence, a fundamental unity. It is important to look for movement and how the machine generates choreographic material. Regarding this sense of flow, it is said that
every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003, p. 36)
Machines are, in this context, decisions about how to direct the flow of creation, how to perpetuate a will to create and an orientation that manifests itself in this chaining. It is, therefore, important to resort to the network image, the rhizome which is so important to Deleuze and Guattari. The process of artistic creation as a flow, that is, as a movement, is perpetuated by machines that orient themselves. The rhizome appears, because the flow is not genealogical, the creation of connections admits that the flow of creation goes back, crosses new territories, overflows horizontally. This perpetual motion will have to contain a motor that gives it the energy, the power, the potentiality. Therefore, the ‘production-of-production’ presents itself as a non-sequential, non-organized process, but one that bends the machine over the abstract and invisible line. But what engine is this? What force fuels this catabolism process? According to Deleuze and Guattari (2003), desire. Desire is what “constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003, p. 5).
Thinking about how machines operate in the creative process and the possibility of moving from the choreographer's center of power, makes me think that creation flows in the direction of minority. The ‘horientation’ takes place in the sense of a minority, since the universal is not sought, but the exact opposite. Here I establish an encounter with Deleuze and Guattari (1986), the idea of minority in the context of minor literature in the work Kafka Toward a Minor Literature. The becoming-minor of choreographic creation is, in this text, related to the quality of the relationship between the choreographer and the interpreters and the relationship within the hierarchies of power. Minority implies a movement towards the small world that is created and the ‘endoconsistency’ of the creation process. Choreographic creation, in an educational context, contains this becoming-minor in several layers. Firstly, because of the layer of resistance to power hierarchies. But also, a layer of the unknown in the encounter with the interpreter. Minor-creation, in educational contexts, is the guarantee of escaping from fixed structures, from non-dialogue modes of operating. Minority means an incomplete path, a path that finds, in the other, a potential transformation. This thought echoes in the first characteristic of minor-literature, meaning, containing a great degree of deterritorialization of its language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). The plane of immanence of choreographic work contains a high degree of deterritorialization. It is necessary to think about what territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization are in the setting of methods and processes of choreographic creation in educational contexts. Thus, “Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding (…) substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 53). I do not intend to delve deeper into the concepts of strata that the authors invoke, but it is interesting to imagine Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy on the threshold, as layers that slide and establish relationships. The strata, where the movement described above takes place, correspond to articulations, areas of relationship and creation in a broad sense. Where stratification accommodates an organization, a creation of the world. Now, deterritorialization is seen as a power that has degrees and thresholds, but which is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its negative. After thinking about the first characteristic of minor literature, I propose that the opening of the machines of creation, their sharing, and the assumption that the dancer can be an effective part in thinking about the choreographic work is a minor-place. And this leads directly to the other two features of minor literature. That is, that everything is political and that everything has a collective value. To sum up, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) summarize the three characteristics as deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.
The gaze and the road
Minority brought an important upside view on the process of creation, meaning, the possibility of reterritorializing, that is, finding ways to populate and repopulate on a common ground. Also, the process of creation containing a political drive and a notion of the common, of the collective in its relationship with the world, the larger world. Masschenlein and Simons (2013) bring a line of thought about the school in its relationship with the world, “we want to argue that profanation and suspension make it possible to open up the world at school and that it is indeed the world (and not individual learning needs or talents) that is being unlocked.” (p. 42). Therefore, I am interested in thinking about these concepts of profanation and suspension to reterritorialize this creation-education plane. Thus, Masschelein (2011) suggests that
Suspension here could be regarded more generally as an event of de-familiarisation, de-socialisation, de-appropriation or de-privatization; it sets something free. The term 'free', however, not only has the negative meaning of suspension (free from), but also a positive meaning, that is, free to. (Masschelein, 2011, p. 531)
The author begins by etymologically situating the school (scholè) according to a paradigm of ‘free time’, in an exercise of thinking about the school’s time based on the Greek definition. Where 'free time' corresponds neither to leisure time, nor to time for learning, development, or growth. But as a time of study, a time that is in the interval between potency and its expression. The teacher, as an educator, is placed as an architect of the scholè, that is, “the one who un-finishes, who undoes the appropriation and destination of time.” (Masschelein, 2011, p. 530). The architect proposes this time in the interval, giving the possibility of its suspension, a time that has no destination or objective or end. Here I find another relationship with choreographic creation since there are areas of affinity for this time in the creative process. That is, in the creative processes, in which the interpreter is an active agent in the creation of materials, where there is space for research, for the encounter with the unknown, time suffers a suspension. An interval is created between the present time of creation, the time where the work is thought, and a future time. Between the action of conducting the process of planning and creation of materials and their composition, the space for the research corresponds to this free time or interlude of freedom. Thus, free time for studying, thinking, and exercising research is a time separate from productive life. It corresponds to a crack in objectivity, a work of relationship with the plane of immanence of the choreographic work. It will be a time in which the interpreter uses the body to establish new encounters. Since,
Free time is not a time for the self (for satisfying needs or developing talents) but a time to engage in something and that something is more important than personal needs, talents or projects. It is by opening a world to children and young people (and, as we have said before, this is not the same as simply making them familiar with it; it is bringing the world to life and making it appeal to them) that children or young people can experience themselves as a new generation in relation to the world, and as a generation capable of making a new beginning. (Masschenlein & Simons, 2013, p. 84)
This idea of relationship can place the choreographic work as an unknown place. A place that is bigger, but oriented towards minority, and that is more important than the place of individuality. There is, in the notion of group, a power of multiplicity. Suspending time is, therefore, an exercise in the temporary stripping of objective layers to enter in the process of agency with creation, where “Education is the giving of authority to the world, not only by talking about the world, but also and especially by dialoguing with (encountering, engaging) it. (…) the task of education is to ensure that the world speaks to young people.” (Masschenlein & Simons, 2013, p. 84). When, in a process of creating-world, as is the creation of choreographic work, this work speaks back to us, there is an encounter. In the creative process I feel, every time, that there is a voice greater than mine, greater than the agents of the creation. This is the voice of the work of art. Or rather, its specificity that is created through the process, that gains authority and has its own consistency. The work of art becomes a shared place that, through its methods and processes, is able to touch and be touched, to relate to the agents in the sense of its appearance. There is a world of its own that allows the work to be, at a certain point, a machine that produces itself. In this place I feel this authority, which has nothing to do with authoritarianism, but choice. The work suggests research paths, suggests places with affinity, creating becomes a game of shared deciphering of this voice, of oscillation between obedience-disobedience. I call the concept of profanation described by Masschelein (2011) as
not a place of emptiness, therefore, but a condition in which things (practices, words) are disconnected from their regular use (in the family and in society) and hence it refers to a condition in which something of the world is open for common use. In that sense these things (practices, words) remain without end: means without an end, or un-finished. (p. 531)
This idea of ‘desecrating’ practices interests me in this scope of artistic creation in dance, since, to the detriment of a methodology of creation per se, which can contain 'free time' and be built on a minor and political plane, the creation of the work of art requires a readjustment of its own methods and processes. This means that, although the teacher-choreographer invokes a way of operating, which may be common in different processes, this agent must be able to readjust and desecrate them. In this sense, profanation is a way to always search for places that are not fixed, but are developed with the encounter. These are practices in the middle way, we can think of them as practices of becoming, because they are ‘horientated’ towards the minority, towards the resistance, towards the unique chance of the event.
According to Deleuze (1990) the event, as presented in The Logic of Sense, is co-extensive with becoming and belongs, essentially, to the domain of language. The event subsists in language, yet it happens on the surface of things. This surface is not related to the exteriority but rather to the threshold, to the border zones, “And just as events do not occupy the surface but rather frequent it, superficial energy is not localized at the surface, but is rather bound to its formation and reformation.” (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 103-104). It is in this area that the connection, the relationship of exchange and affinity is established. In this way, there is a fundamental difference between the event and the accident, since “The splendor and the magnificence of the event is sense. The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed.” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 272). That is, the interior of the event and its ideational nature is expressed to the detriment of what happens by accident on the surface, “(e)vents are ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event. They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist.” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 53). Beck and Gleyzon (2016) can help in understanding the event, since they affirm that the Deleuzian event integrates and arises from multiplicity and that it is part of the process of becoming and differentiation. In this way, the Deleuzian event is rhizomatic and is constantly in motion. The event contains a character of change and continuous modification because “they reshape the conceptual and material fabric of connectivity, relationships, pathways and institutions. (...) events begin from the domain of affect and the virtual (temporal) but are only actualised in space.” (Beck & Gleyzon, 2016, p. 329). This spatial, and not temporal, aspect gives the event a capacity to reformulate reality, “(e)vents not only manifest in space, but through their spatiality they also change and reconfigure material reality.” (Beck & Gleyzon, 2016, p. 329). And it is on this plane that the process of creation appears embodied, in a matrix of becoming, in a field of problematization where “understanding the space of events and their spatial implications is tantamount to understanding cultural change, sites of resistance, ecology, cinematic terror and migratory (im)mobility.” This is the place of resistance and its relation to the threshold and how it manifests in the connection.
We have seen, so far, that suspension and profanation are operative concepts for scholè to happen. There is a Deleuzian event in this vision, since thinking is creating, a creation with a political and critical driving force of freedom. Thus, there is a third concept, by Masschelein (2010), which consists of attention. It is not a total release of the gaze, nor of making it conscious, but educating the eyes to attention. There is an attentive dimension to this proposal that it is important to bring to the process of creating the choreographic work. Because “(c)onsciousness is the state of mind of a subject that has or has an object(ive) and aims at knowledge. Attention is the state of mind in which the subject and the object are brought into play.” (Masschelein, 2010, p. 44). Attention implies, in this vision, that the world can open and that I can be transformed, which echoes perfectly in the vision of choreographic creation expressed in the possibility of the interpreter-creator. Attention opens an atopic space, as the author calls it, since ‘e-ducating’ the gaze requires a practice of critical investigation, which produces a practical change in ourselves and in the present in which we live. There is, in the author's words, a constant movement of displacement, an exit from us to the world and, in this process, of being able to transform ourselves, of being able to territorialize and deterritorialize.
Such a critical research practice is not dependent on method, but relies on discipline; it does not require a rich methodology, but asks for a poor pedagogy, i.e. for practices, which allow us to expose ourselves, practices, which bring us onto the street, displace us. (Masschelein, 2010, p. 44).
‘E-ducating’ the gaze will be an attention to the decision, that is, splitting ourselves so that we can expose. And, in this openness, we transform ourselves. ‘E-ducating’ the gaze consists in the possibility of breaking perceptions and freeing oneself from objectivity. There is a construction of the self in the process of looking at the world, in the process of being attentive to the world. And it is in this way of looking, that Masschelein (2010) reads the text Chinese Curios by Benjamin (2016):
The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. (p. 27)
Walking on the street or flying over it expresses different powers, just like reading a text and copying it. There is, in this view, a power over the act of doing, over the action of copying the text, where whoever copies submits to the text's command, oversees a larger task. Masschelein (2010) states that this movement of being attentive and open to the world constitutes a research practice. The principle that governs the text or the road is not an imposition, but a manifestation of a power and a potency of learning, as it does not indicate a path, but a displacement. Copying the text is, in this way, a paradoxical activity where one is commanded by something, which is not yet given, but in the way of being given, something presents itself during the path to be followed. This resonates perfectly in the practices of choreographic creation because there is not a way of creating, but a multiplicity of pathways to be taken, to be looked. Where the encounter is a potency of ‘e-ducating’ the gaze, a time where we practice the way of being-with, of becoming-with.
Walking on, walking with
Walking is a physical activity of shifting the weight, of shifting the gaze, of changing one's position in a continuum of ‘ex-positions’. There is a trajectory that meets and builds the ground, a path that always opens perspectives only with the direction of the gaze. Basically, it consists of moving along the same road and always taking different paths, since “Walking, then, is a critical practice involving a limit-attitude that transforms us, not by making us conscious, but by making us pay attention” (Masschelein, 2010, p. 47).
In this sense, this critical practice or critical ‘e-educational’ investigation is not expressed in a clear vision, or discernment or specific knowledge, but configures a mode of investigation. A way of ‘trying’. This ‘e-education’ of the gaze defines a concrete space, a space of practical freedom and it is at this point that there is a natural affinity with the processes of creation. The process of choreographic creation in an ‘e-educational’ context configures an existential space of transformation and exhibition. I approach the ‘e-education’ of the gaze, the suspension, and the profanation, in the context of choreographic creation, as a discursive practice.
Attention to practices, the choices that take place in the process, the methods that readjust and look at each other again, are an educational terrain. This is the terrain, the plane of the encounter, the place between Deleuze and Masschelein that I tried to draw. In the intersection between the authors, Deleuze and Masschelein, there are two responsibilities of the educator-choreographer. The first consists in sharing the world and the responsibility for it, which implies that the teacher-choreographer frees the interpreter from the notion of operability, that everything has an end in itself, so that there is a suspension in the time of creation. The second responsibility has to do with the creation of interest, that is, connection points, hook points in the mesh that is the creation of the choreographic work. This expresses the resistance of the process of creating the work, and its educational valence, where the practice of creation, their methods and processes are valid, not for their operationality or pedagogical validation, but for their 'authority' in the process.
The potency of the machines that are joined together through the axis of creation. That is, by the relationship with the world that is proposed. In short,
Indeed, in Latin inter-est literally means something that exists between us. One can only create interest for the common world by showing one's own love for that world. And how could one arouse interest in the world if the message relayed to young people is that they are most important and thus most interesting? (Masschenlein & Simons, 2013, p. 86)
Throughout this text there was an attempt to map three key ideas: the Deleuzian machine that gives the creation process and the choreographic work an endoconsistency and its own architecture; the minority as a guarantee of this process of construction of a small world in the process of creating the choreographic work and, finally, the need to profane suspend and pay attention during the creation process, during the learning process.
In the educational context, contrary to a 'common' artistic context, the form of choreographic approach by the teacher-choreographer is as important as the pedagogical attitude. They are plans that do not cancel each other, but that meet, and, through their union, the teacher-choreographer will be able to suggest new opportunities of an honest artistic education or e-ducaction. The artistic e-ducation is, in this context, the healing of the wound that opens when approaching the choreographic creation in an educational plane. In this way, it is important to think about the processes and practices of contemporary choreographic creation through the pedagogical potentiality. The possibility of experimentation and improvisation are important spheres as exercises of suspension. They become pedagogical tools of the event, opening the layers of attention and relation. The teacher-choreographer calls, with the use of these tools, for a greater responsibility in the dialogue with the student-interpreter by engaging in the creation of the choreographic material through these (un)useful tools. In this way, the immaterial substance of dance is constructed by the negotiation between the support of the teacher-choreographer and the cultural capital of the student-interpreter. This constitutes a fundamental unit of a creative process under the socio-constructivist perspective, where artistic practice is seen as a construct, and the process of teaching-learning as a geographical topography of togetherness.
