Aesthetic Strategies of Trance-gression: The Politics of Bodily Scenes of Ecstasy

Abstract

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

Aesthetic Strategies of Trance-gression: The Politics of Bodily Scenes of Ecstasy – CORRIGENDUM

“…In Sabine Huschka's article in DRJ 51(2), “Aesthetic Strategies of Trance-gression : The Politics of Bodily Scenes of Ecstasy” (Huschka 2019), the reference for the term “Tanztheologie” on page 9 was accidentally lost during the translation of the article from German to English prior to the submission to the journal. The term stems from the work of Alexander Schwan (2009) as follows:…”

Being and Becoming

“…All of the interrelated elements in his work were whole and full, and put together, like energized bodies in space, they transcended their own boundaries to become something new, something "trance-gressive." 13 The term trance-gressive I drawn from dance scholar Sabine Huschka's definition of a fusion of trance and transgression in dance performance; she describes these as "aesthetical acts" which "seek to open up a divided space of experience." 14 Huschka's definition invokes Michel Foucault's association of transgression with potential and possibility: transgression "opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world" and it "carries the limit right to the limit of its being;…forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance."…”