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A Theological Turn? French Postmodern Dance and Herman Diephuis’ D’après J C

This essay is part of an enquiry into what philosophical theology can offer performance studies. Here I ask if French postmodern dance embodies the idea of grace as a gift given through fleshly suffering and intuition. First, working with Derrida’s distinction between a “theological stage” of representation and a “nontheological” theatre of unrepresentable life, I define three “nontheological” tendencies in works by Jérôme Bel and Mathilde Monnier: overdetermination, metonymic contingency and visceral excess. In these terms I indicate how Herman Diephuis’s D’après J C (After J C, 2004), a show choreographed from Renaissance paintings of Christ’s life, is “theological”. Secondly, however, I contest Derrida’s distinction, and thus perform a “theological turn”, by re-reading D’après J C through the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, Derrida’s sometime student. Specifically, I indicate how this show gives real time-value to the weight of bodies and objects as they are held or fall, and thus promotes an experience of contingency that calls for a different way of witnessing: firstly, witnessing as suffering in the sense of literally be-holding the contingent other; secondly, witnessing as the intuition not of a “ruling idea”, but of the “visible bursting” as contingent facets of each painting are revealed through the kaleidoscope of dancing bodies. For Marion, witnessing in this double sense is “d’après” Jesus Christ, for the paradigm case, he argues, is the revelation of Christ, an experience that is “unforeseeable”, “unbearable”, “in excess”, and “irregardable”. I indicate how D’après J C thus touches on a transcendent form of ethics and politics recalling the humanism of French Catholic thinkers and writers of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Contemporary French Theatre and Performance is the “first book to explore the relationship between experimental theatre and performance making in France” (Palgrave 2011). A review can be found at: http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=%22Contemporary+French+Theatre+and+Performance%22&submit=yes&x=0&y=0.