The Maori of Australia have long understood that the first movements soon became dance and the dance brought music (and the first words – songs) from us. The ancestors danced and sang the Songlines of the world into existence. Everything, according to this view, is the result of choreography. We do not give up the dance easily as those who have observed hangings note that the dying body continues to dance on nothing. Life is a very long dance and we have only one. Look under a microscope at a one celled life form – what is it we see? Dancing. Soon one moves into two and two into four and before long… into one of us. It is the dance of life – DNA is but one of the choreographies of adaptation.

1. Joseph Beuys. Bog Action (1971)

Joseph Beuys was among the most poetic characters to emerge from the Western world in the twentieth century. It is perhaps not surprising that he came to world-wide recognition in the 1960’s – a decade light on its feet. A significant portion of Beuys’ art involved performances he called actions. The action was at the heart of his poetic dance of art as life. Beuys’ artistic dance, his choreography of the actions, set processes in motion which attempted to break apart that which had become ossified. Beuys reminded us at many turns that an important part of forgetting that each of us is an artist involved forgetting the dance. As a master dancer he extended space inwards. His life dance was mythical and pre-rational – an effort to dance art outside of the normal confines of the museum world. As a dance against linearity, against uni-directional progress, art could dance us back in time to discover warm feelings we shared long ago and might share again. He saw Marcel Duchamp’s retreat into personal isolation as an art only of meaninglessness: “the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated” he told German Televison in 1964.

The dancer is skeptical of theories that implicitly recognize and explicitly accept the world as it is. Dance depends on a being-seen-ness as a way of communicating. The point of the life dance of Joseph Beuys was to be seen connecting art to all aspects of life. For him everyone was an artist. This is dancer’s knowledge for we are all dancers and all choreographers. Each of us must ultimately dance alone just as our heart and the blood in our veins dances its own unique rhythm. Dance ultimately heightens one’s sense of self worth in the world which is at the core of our ability to coexist. Beuys, like many dancers, performed in a costume. In his case this involved the famous felt hat and fishing vest. In this costume he danced a rigorously personal, original and philosophical program.

2. Beuys. With students (c1966)

Before we are anything else we are dancers and only an approach which embraces this totality can help us to plumb the depths of the problems of existence. In making his life into a performance dance of art Beuys choreographed his teaching and his politics into the dance of art. In dancing himself backwards in time he found in himself the shaman. A shaman dances himself inside and outside of various creatures. For Beuys these included the hare and the coyote. His moving action How to explain art to a dead hare saw him slowly dance a hare around a museum while onlookers watched through a glass wall. His coyote action was the most balletic of his performances taking place over four days in a room he shared with a coyote called “Little John”. It was when in the presence of animals, becoming the animal, both living and dead, that Beuys best enacted his shamanic dance – the most ‘classical’ of dances.

3. Beuys. “I like America and America likes me” (Coyote Action) New York (1974)

Viewing the photographic record of Beuys with the coyote (as well as many of his actions) is liberating as it/they point toward the dance of life as art in the formation and fluidity of individual identity. Beuys is remembered as one of the best artists of the 20th century but he was also, in his unique manner, among its best anthropologists as well. Among his lessons is that the dance is not merely a subject for anthropological study but for the exercise of our personal anthropological powers. The anthropologist as dancer moves in and out of time to understand what came before our current extremes of materialism while imagining us after a period of great crisis. The Beuysean dance is ecological and it is at its basis a survival dance. Beuys was the body as vehicle – the dancer as time machine bent on inhabiting a better future.

4. Beuys. ‘Choreographing’ (c1969)

For Beuys the vehicle for the renewal of social structures and the survival of our (and other) species was to be a kind of dance which his actions – also called social sculptures – would initiate. Often his actions contained chalk drawings on blackboards and marks on floors. These were the place of his own speculative choreography of the action. Drawing was for him a part of the dance of life as art. All of it led him to a kind of capital – art as a new form of capital to be invested in the human cause. Dance thus becomes an authentic form of capital. Beuys’ entire life was that of a body in motion with artistic intent – his art and his actions record the life dance of Joseph Beuys. This dance was an expression of human emotion with enormous potential to ignite creativity – the power to signal new worlds into existence with the beginning of a song. Beuys’ life was a constant state of dance which attempted to free our raw thinking abilities concerning how we might choreograph our lives more artistically. For him dance was not only a process, and it was more than a language – it was an ongoing effort to point others and himself to the flows that are initiated by the giving of a gift.

5. Beuys. Shaman, Dancer… (1975)

Beuys constantly called upon us to see ourselves as starkly emotional beings with the power to choose what we would be and to what tunes we would dance. The life as art dance of Joseph Beuys spoke to us with its own deliberate poetic voice as a new kind of para-linguistic expression. The art that is dance was at the core of his interpretation of movement as communication. Like the best dancers he was a body in movement with artistic intent.

IMAGE CREDITS
Image 1 (Bog Action) : Photograph by Caroline Tisdall. From Caroline Tisall (1998). Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way. Paris: Editions Violette.

Image 2 (with students): from exhibition catalogue: Joseph Beuys and his students – Works from the Deutsche Bank Collection. Istanbul, Turkey: Sakip Museum, Sabanci
University (2009). Photographer not credited.

Image 3: (Coyote Action) Photograph by Caroline Tisdall (souce as per image 1)

Image 4: (at blackboard): Photographer Unknown, available at:
http://sxchristopher.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/late-for-the-lecture-joseph-beuys-in-athens-ii/

Image 5 (Beuys with symbols) is by Ute Klophaus, available at:
www.track16.com/exhibitions/beuys/beuys1.html

Dr. Gerry Coulter is a Full Professor of Sociology (Art, Film, and Theory) at Bishop’s University, Canada. Recent peer review publications include: ‘Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming’, SAGE Journal: Games and Culture (Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365) and at: http://www.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/358; ‘The Poetry of Reversibility and The Other in The English Patient’, Widescreen Journal. (Volume 1, Number 1, April 2008): http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/15/14;
‘Baudrillard and Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution of the World’, Nebula, (Volume 5, Number 4, December 2008:145-164) and at: www.nobleworld.biz/Coulter.pdf. : His essay “A Way of Proceeding: Joseph Beuys, the Epistemological Break, and Radical Thought Today” appeared in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image in May – June, 2008: http://intertheory.org/gcoulter.htm. He also writes a quarterly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine (http://www.euroartmagazine.com. Dr. Coulter’s teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s University’s highest award for teaching the William and Nancy Turner Prize. He is the Founding and Managing Editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On the Internet): (www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies).