On “Contemporaneity” in Ballet and Contemporary Dance : Jeux in 1913 and 2016

Abstract

Danced histories are not linear but circular, as dancing bodies return and reinterpret past dances. Theorizing the import of contemporaneity as an evaluative notion, this chapter examines a practice-based research collaboration—the reimagining of Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet Jeux (1913) in a contemporary dance production that premiered in 2016. Such performed returns to the past of dance are never unmarked or neutral but involve evaluation of what in the past is worthy or significant enough – that is, canonical – to be referenced and restaged, how, and by whom. Examining the different relationship of past and present in the practices of reconstruction, re-enactment, or reimagining past dances, the chapter examines how performances reinforce, repeat, or potentially question canons and power relations inherent in the institution of art. Might attention to how presentness itself shifts in time draw attention to not-knowing, to the heterogeneity of and limits to our kinesthetic imaginations?