Dancing in general - Coreographic the public, making asamblage - Rudi Laermans

In his study AbweJ>entheit ('Absence'), subtitled 'A performative aesthetic of dance', Gerald Siegmund {2006) demonstrates at length that contemporary choreographers such as William Forsythe, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roy and Meg Stuart regularly emphasize in their work the absence of the real dancing body in its doubling self-representation. These and other contemporary dance makers often highlight the constitutive split between the real and tbe sensory body observed by means of technical devices, sucb as microphones and video images.

Particularly tbe possibilities offered by video-technology, such as the enlarging of body fragments or tbe delayed, even refigured representation of an already seen movement, are a favourite means to create a fissure in the spectator's gaze. The fissure not only destabilizes the spectator's panoptical point of view but also
makes visible that one doesn't see what one thinks one sees, i.e., the presence of a real body.