Discomforting/Disarming Touch: Experiencing Affective Contradiction in Improvisatory Dance Performance

Abstract

This chapter investigates the affective resonances and possible sociopolitical implications of moments of choice, contradiction and vulnerability in improvised dance performance. Focusing on the spectator’s experience of affective contradiction in The Work, The Work (2010), by dance theatre company Fitzgerald and Stapleton, it examines how the piece functions as both a performance of women’s experience of corporeal vulnerability and precarity in contemporary Irish society, and simultaneously as a performance of empowering choice. It considers how the experience of affective contradiction in this work might produce a questioning of usual patterns of viewing for the spectator, provoking a heightened awareness, and potential rethinking, of how Irish society diminishes women’s ‘power of activity’ by restricting their capacity for corporeal autonomy and choice (Spinoza in Spinoza: the complete works. Hackett Publishing, Cambridge, p. 258, 2002).

I ask for an ascension—the delivery of touch across space-some rare unnatural mercy—to cheat distance for love

(Emma Fitzgerald, The Work, The Work, 2010).