Camilla Damkjaer

The Aesthetics of Movement: - Variations on Gilles Deleuze and Merce Cunningham Camilla Damkjaer

This is an interdisciplinary study of the aesthetics of movement in Gilles Deleuze?s writings and in Merce Cunningham?s choreographies. But it is also a study of the movement that arises when the two meet in a series of variations. It is a textual happening where the random juxtaposition between seemingly unrelated areas, philosophy and dance, gives rise to arbitrary connections. It is a textual machine, composed of seven parts. First, the methodological architecture of the juxtaposition is introduced. The presence of movement in Deleuze?s thinking is then presented and the figure of immobile movement is defined. This figure is a leitmotif of the analyses. Then follow four parts that build a heterogeneous whole. The analysis of movement is continued through four juxtapositions of particular texts and choreographies. Through these juxtapositions, different aspects of movement appear and are discussed: the relation between movement and sensation, movement in interaction with other arts, movement as a means of taking the body to its limit, movement as transformation. In the seventh and concluding part, all this is brought into play.