Tinkering Away, The Untimely Art of Subtraction

Philipa Rothfield (La Trobe University)

In “One Manifesto Less”, Gilles Deleuze writes about a mode of transformation found in the work of the Italian theatre director, Carmelo Bene. By way of discussion, Deleuze refers to three of Bene’s productions, each an adaptation of a work by an iconic author or playwright. In all three examples raised by Deleuze, Bene took away some key element from the original. Neither critique (a form of judgement) nor a form of representation (a continuation of the language of the theatre), subtraction constitutes a dynamic interruption which destabilises the work so as to allow for the emergence of new possibilities. Deleuze’s term for this is the release of a “new potentiality”. Subtraction is a means by which to destabilise that which is normative within the theatre, thereby to provoke something new or “untimely”. What might subtraction mean in the field of dance which is neither centred on the text nor depends upon representation as such? This paper poses three ways of conceiving of subtraction within dance, in relation to the canonical, choreographic production and the audience-performer relation. It argues that the notion of subtraction offers a particular way of conceiving of the production of the new within the kinaesthetic sphere, one which acknowledges the embodied legacy of training and technique in dance.

Philipa Rothfield is an honorary senior lecturer in philosophy at La Trobe University. She is the Dancehouse Creative Advisor, and heads the Editorial Board of the Dancehouse Diary. She is a dance reviewer for RealTime Arts magazine and Momm Magazine (Korea). She is Co-convenor of the Choreography and Corporeality working group, of the International Federation of Theatre Research. She writes on dance and philosophy and has chapters in several collections including the Routledge Dance Studies Reader (Routledge), Somatechnics (Ashgate), Deleuze and the Body (EUP) and Ethics and Arts (Springer).