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Dance

Re: Philippe Nuss, medical doctor, psychiatrist and philosopher of movement, Jean-Christophe Boclé and Liz Santoro, choreographers [By Tracy Danison]

1.AURE Charles André Eudes EAD Plan serré 19 03 25 CMA 17 8 - copie
Cognition, functionality, autonomy/flow, happening, sensibility/positioning, sound, movement. Dance performers Aure Barbier and Charles Noyerie rehearse a phrase from Nijinsky’s Après-midi d’un Faun as noted in Labanonotation by dance analyst, the late Ann Hutchinson Guest. Music accompaniment by pianist Yumi Otsu (off-left), Eudes Bernstein and André Tallon, clarinette and saxophone, direction of Jean-Christophe Boclé, Conservatoire Claude Debussy, Paris, 19 March 2025. Photo © ektos Cie 


Dr. Philippe Nuss is a psychiatrist specializing in bipolar disorders who uses dance in his therapeutic tool-kit. Among many other things, holds the chair of philosophy for the Paris hospital group. But most of all, he has a miraculous ability to put words to things, without a breath of overstatement.

Nuss suggested to participants at a conference on the “Power of Dance” at Palais du Chaillot that dance might be “joy”. By joy, he means “alignment of the physiologies” of cognition, functionality and autonomous movement. Joy, if I understand him, is the moment between the moving self and putting the self in movement. Joy, the therapeutic result, would be - I am not quoting here - a reconnection with self-conscious autonomy or a renewed sense of will.

Nuss’ idea sounds right to me; it probably rings a bell for anybody who’s had to do with psychosis, near psychosis or dementia. I think “alignment of physiologies” for “joy” correlate to the “flow, happening, sensibility” toward (access to un-narrative space) “Imagination” that condition spectator response to Dance, big D, too.

Nuss’ alignment process and mirroring (imitative response) are making me revise how I think about my response to dance performance, especially to work I respond to strongly. Jean-Christophe Boclé’s Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects Boclé is one of the dance pieces that has most touched me most strongly. I associate Boclé’s work and my response to it to Liz Santoro’s (and Pierre Godard’s) work and my response to it  – I’m thinking of Relative Collider, Maps or The Game of Life.  

I wrote about Boclé’s Partitions(s) here in More than dancin’: "Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects" and Santoro’s and Godard’s The Game of Life in Varieties of dance performance: trading a mess of pottage for sense and awareness. Almost a year ago now, Boclé invited me to follow as he works on Est au delà … Une raison d’être (“Beyond… Une raison d’être”), a work-in-progress which should debut this coming September. Boclé is also working on what he believes to be the ur-version of Vaslav Nijinski’s Après-midi d’un faun.

I’ve checked in from time to time since then and had the pleasure of watching him at work and experiencing Est au delà and Faun taking shape.

Of both Partitions and The Game, I was thinking that spectator pleasure localizes in a repetition of gesture. It’s a heuristic trick, works a little like hypnotism: the repetition somehow induces perception to follow the flow, join the happening and sensibility and access un-narrative space. If Santoro and Godard refine their approach to repetition with the science of information theory, Boclé’s is dance performance experience and knowledge along with an ability to mobilize both in order to, first, see movement finely, and then to precisely communicate with performers.

But now, if there is both a physiological process and a (therapeutic) result when an actor is in, as Nuss put it, “in a situation of dance”, I am wondering whether the spectator response to dance performance is a result of mirroring the process of autonomy. As a spectator of Boclé’s or Santoro’s and Godard’s work, I am responding first as a mirror to (what I presume to be) a shared autonomic process and then to the perceptible shaping of the process’ flow or movement by manipulation of the elements of performance, including the arrangements of places, positions, gestures, sound and light. In other words, repetitive gesture is complementary, not primary. Which means my strong response to Boclé and Santoro/Godard’s work reflects these choreographers’ skill at modeling the flow, happening and sensibility of dance performance, not necessarily their particular ability to open the door on Imagination.


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