Choreographies of 21st Century Wars

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Derek Gregory

As regular readers will know, I’m keenly interested in the intersections between performance works and the critique of military violence – using performance not only as a way of engaging audiences and creating publics but also as an intrinsic part of the research process itself.

Much of my own work has focussed on theatre, and I’ve commented on the multiple meanings of ‘theatre of war’ on several occasions (see here, here and here, though I know there’s much more to say about that).

But I’ve also drawn attention to the role of dance – notably Rosie Kay‘s collaborative project with visual artist David Cotterrell, 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline (see my post on ‘Bodies on the line‘ here; more on the production here and here).

All of which will explain my interest in this new collection of essays (which includes a contribution from Rosie Kay), Choreographies of 21st Century Wars, edited by Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf:

Wars in this century are radically different from the major conflicts of the 20th century–more amorphous, asymmetrical, globally connected, and unending. Choreographies of 21st Century Wars is the first book to analyze the interface between choreography and wars in this century, a pertinent inquiry since choreography has long been linked to war and military training. The book draws on recent political theory that posits shifts in the kinds of wars occurring since the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War, all of which were wars between major world powers. Given the dominance of today’s more indeterminate, asymmetrical, less decisive wars, we ask if choreography, as an organizing structure and knowledge system, might not also need revision in order to reflect on, and intercede in, a globalized world of continuous warfare. In an introduction and sixteen chapters, authors from a number of disciplines investigate how choreography and war in this century impinge on each other. Choreographers write of how they have related to contemporary war in specific works, while other contributors investigate the interconnections between war and choreography through theatrical works, dances, military rituals and drills, the choreography of video war games and television shows. Issues investigated include torture and terror, the status of war refugees, concerns surrounding fighting and peacekeeping soldiers, national identity tied to military training, and more. The anthology is of interest to scholars in dance, performance, theater, and cultural studies, as well as the social sciences.

Here is the Contents list:

Introduction: Contemporary Choreographies of Wars, Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf
Chapter 1: Access Denied and Sumud: Making a Dance of Asymmetric Warfare, Nicholas Rowe
Chapter 2: Questioning the Truth: Rachid Ouramdane’s Investigation of Torture in Des Témoins Ordinaires/Ordinary Witnesses, Alessandra Nicifero
Chapter 3: “There’s a Soldier in All of Us”: Choreographing Virtual Recruitment, Derek A. Burrill
Chapter 4: African Refugees Asunder in South Africa: Performing the Fallout of Violence in Every Day, Every Year, I am Walking, Sarah Davies Cordova
Chapter 5: From Temple to Battlefield: Bharata Natyam in the Sri Lankan Civil War, Janet O’Shea
Chapter 6: Choreographing Masculinity in Contemporary Israeli Culture, Yehuda Sharim
Chapter 7: Affective Temporalities: Dance, Media, and the War on Terror, Harmony Bench
Chapter 8: Specter of War, Spectacle of Peace: The Lowering of Flag Ceremony at Wagah and Hussainiwala Borders, Neelima Jeychandran
Chapter 9: A Choreographer’s Statement, Bill T. Jones
Chapter 10: Dancing in the Spring: Dance, Hegemony and Change, Rosemary Martin
Chapter 11: War and P.E.A.C.E, Maaike Bleeker & Janez Janša
Chapter 12: The Body is the Frontline, Rosie Kay and Dee Reynolds
Chapter 13: Geo-Choreography and Necropolitics: Faustin Linyekula’s Studios Kabako, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ariel Osterweis
Chapter 14: Re: moving bodies in the Mexico-USA drug, border, cold, and terror wars, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco
Chapter 15: After Cranach: War, Representation and the Body in William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, Gerald Siegmund
Chapter 16: The Role of Choreography in Civil Society under Siege: William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, Mark Franko

There’s obviously a lot more to say about choreographing war too…

Drones and drama

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Derek Gregory

I’ve noted several performance works that address drone wars before, and I’ve now encountered two more.

George Brant‘s new play, Grounded, has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a solo drama (‘monologue’ really doesn’t do it justice) about a US Air Force pilot who has been obliged to switch from flying F-16s to Reapers (and so to the ‘Chair Force’) after her maternity leave.

The focus is on a domestic geography of remote operations that is beginning to attract more critical attention and which resonates with what Grégoire Chamayou calls the ‘psychopathologies of the drone‘: the difficulty of switching every day, every shift, from being in the war zone, at least virtually – what she calls being “downrange” – to being at home with a young family.

‘We’ll be working in shifts. Tapping each other out and taking the controls. A never-ending mission. Home will be training too. Getting used to the routine. Driving to war like it’s shift work. Like I’m punching the clock. Used to transition home once a year. Now it’ll be once a day. Different. Definitely different.’

The pilot finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the separation – to decompress – and gradually and ever more insistently one space keeps superimposing itself over the other; the fixed, precise sensor of the Gorgon Stare yields to a blurred vision in which the pilot finds it increasingly difficult to know where (or who) she is.

She begins by familiarising herself with the landscape in Afghanistan and the spectral figures moving through it:

‘I stare at the desert. They’re twelve hours ahead there. Night. Weird. I stare at the screen. It’s not like a videogame. A videogame has color. I stare at grey. At a world carved out of putty. Like someone took the time to carve a putty world for me to stare at twelve hours a day. High-definition putty….

‘The eye in the sky waits for the putty people to get closer together. Just a little closer. Closer. Closer. There I press the button. I watch the screen. A moment. A moment. And boom. A silent grey boom.’

‘It becomes your world,’ she says, a world populated by the living and the dead whose greyness bleeds one into the other:

‘Lingering over the dead. A mound of the dead. Our dead. They were ambushed and I am to linger over their bodies. I do. With no idea of who they are or how they got here. A mound of our grey. Our boys in grey. Please let me find the guilty who did this the military age males who did this send me to shred their bodies into pieces too fine for my resolution…’

But then the Nevada desert on the drive home starts to resemble the landscape in Afghanistan; the face of a little girl on the screen, the daughter of a ‘High Value Target’, becomes the face of her own child:

‘The girl Her face She stops running and I see it Her face I see it clearly I can see her It’s Sam It’s not his daughter it’s mine…’

There’s much more – much of it turning on imagery and surveillance – and it’s richer and less linear than I can convey here. You can download the script from Amazon or buy hard copy from Oberon Books here; in the UK Grounded has just transferred from the Edinburgh Festival to the Gate in London until 28 September: details here, and other dates in the US here (scroll down).

I’ve also received a message from Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn, a German-Bolivian theatre-maker who has lived and worked in Afghanistan for the last six years. Hjalmar brought the “Theatre of the Oppressed” to Afghanistan and co-founded the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO). He’s currently writing a new play to be premiered in Kabul in November, which focuses on drones and suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Pakistan: clearly another parallel with Grégoire Chamayou‘s work.

More to come, I hope, and I’ll keep you posted, but you can watch and listen to an inspiring talk by Hjalmar on Afghanistan and community-based theatre here:

Note: Back to my reading of Théorie du drone next week – this week has been filled with preparing for the new term which starts on Tuesday (so I’m updating the course outlines under the TEACHING tab). I’ve also had a lovely e-mail from Grégoire Chamayou, and we are going to try a digital conversation – once the dust of the beginning of term has settled – and when we’re done, I’ll post the transcript here.