emociones y sociologia

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The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Expressivism and Chance Procedure: The Future of an EmotionAuthor(s): Mark FrankoSource: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 21 (Spring, 1992), pp. 142-160Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard Collegeacting through the Peabody Museum ofArchaeology and Ethnology

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142 RES 1 SPRING1992

Figure 1. Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham inSeptet (1953). Photo:W. H. Stephen. Courtesyof the Dance Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, andTilden Foundations.

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Expressivism and chance procedureThe future of an emotionMARK FRANKO

Since the "Cunningham revolution," two criticalpositions on expressivity have emerged. Dance criticMarcia Siegel argues for a return to the expressivevalues lost since Cunningham and post-Cunninghamwork.1 In particular, Siegel would like expression to besnatched back from the dangers that theory represents.In her view, theory contaminates the practices ofcriticism, history, and choreography alike. Conversely,an overwhelming prejudice against expressivity in ourcentury has led philosopher Francis Sparshott todiscount its historical existence and purpose. Hedismisses expressivity as a topic of philosophicalinvestigation because it is not theoretically cogent. Iwill argue against Sparshott that expression is endowedwith its own theory,2 and against Siegel that even thoseelements in performance that seem the most "intuitive,visceral and preverbal" can be profitably discussed intheoretical terms. Cunningham's work did not originally

dismiss expressivity as much as it sought to redefine it.3As long as Cunningham was actively putting

expressivity into question, he manipulated theexpressive model in new ways.

IEarly modernist expressivity was nourished byclassical expression theory. Expression theory makesemotion a stimulus of dance movement. In so doing, itdivides emotions into discrete events impinging on theinner consciousness of the subject. Consider that theoryin the concise formulation of early-twentieth-centurymodern dancer Loi? Fuller. Working backward frommotion to emotion, Fuller called motion "the expressionof a sensation" and sensation "the reverberation that the

body receives when an impression strikes the mind."4For the actor itcould be charted as follows:Impression ?? Sensation ?? Expression

Impression is an inner realization; sensation, the feelingengendered by the impression; expression, thecrystallization of an outer reaction. Expression respondsoutwardly to sensation through a physical displacementdissipating sensation's indwelling reverberation. Whenextended to dance, expression theory allows that musicbe the initial impression whose impact on the soul(sensation) is translated into the physical movement ofdance. For the dancer it could be charted:

Music ?> Feeling ?? Dance

This essay was first presented as part of the panel "Philosophy,Dance, and Ordinary Bodies," at the conference Bodies: Image,

Writing, Technology sponsored by the International Association forPhilosophy and Literature at the University of California, Irvine, 1990.Thanks are extended to the dancers, choreographers, and scholarswhose different thoughts and contributions helped shape this essay:Evan Alderson, Richard Bull, Ann Daly, Douglas Dunn, Susan Foster,Susan Manning, Juliet Neidish, Cynthia Novack, George Russell, and

Valerie Wise.1. "The dilemma of modern dance," Siegel writes, "and to some

extent all contemporary Western dance, has been how to honorphysical expressiveness without descending to trivial levels ofthought." See her "The Truth About Apples and Oranges," The DramaReview 32/4 (Winter 1988): 24-31. On post-Cunningham work, seeSally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers. Post-Modern Dance(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1987).

2. Francis Sparshott, Off the Ground. First Steps Toward aPhilosophical Consideration of Dance (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1988), p. 156. While eminently applicable to dance,expressivity is not limited to an ideology of spontaneous effusion.Clearly, there can be an art of the expressive gesture just as there canbe an art of imitation. That is, expressive movement can bemetaphorically as well as spontaneously emotive in dance. It imitates

inwardness. Thus, by referring to the expressivity of dancing inwhatfollows, Ido not mean to suggest that expressive properties of adancer's performance must, in the words of Alan Tormey, "be linked

noncontingently to some particular inner state of the performer." Onthat question, see his The Concept of Expression: A Study inPhilosophical Psychology and Aesthetics (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1971), p. 111.

3. Iam concerned here with expressivity in its narrow sense, theexpression of emotion, rather than with its broader sense, theexpression of ideas. For an interesting treatment of these two topics,see No?l Carroll, "Post-Modern Dance and Expression," inGordonFancher and Gerald Myers, Philosophical Essays on Dance (NewYork: Dance Horizons, 1981), pp. 95-104. In this essay, however, Iwish to modify the view expressed by Carroll and Sally Banes that the

Cunningham dancer was neither a personal nor a social agent. Seetheir "Cunningham and Duchamp," Ballet Review 11:2 (Summer1983): 74.

4. Loi? Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life (New York: DanceHorizons, 1978), p. 70.



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144 RES 21 SPRING 1992

When applied to dance, classical expression theoryholds that feeling attains outward expression in reactionto the harmony of music.Although itdid receive much attention in the 1870s,as Francis Sparshott suggests,5 the tenets of expression

theory precede Loi? Fuller by at least four hundredyears. In 1463, Italian dancing master Guglielmo Ebreoda Pesaro wrote that we respond to harmony as we are"moved to perform certain demonstrative externalmovement, signifying what we feel within."6Seventeenth-century French librettist and theoristGuillaume Colletet attributes the imitation of a passionsuch as joy in dancing to "the impressions which thesoul makes naturally on the body."7 According to thisview, the impression of harmony on the soul indirectlycauses the body to move:

The soul takes such pleasure in harmony that itwouldvoluntarily leave itself to join harmony more perfectly. But,though there are obstacles preventing it from returning tothat natural felicity in itspresent state, the soul can stilloblige the body which constrains it to imitate harmonythrough dance; dance can be called a conformity of thebody to the soul and of the soul to movement.8

In this quote, Colletet clarifies that the sensations of thesoul can only be acted on, as itwere, by the body as aproxy. Thus, at its theoretical root, the concept ofimitation is never far from that of expressivity. In

moving joyfully, the dancer cannot help but representthe joyful movement of the soul: dancing is by itsnature secondary because it is derivative of a spiritualreality that it represents. The body is not respondingdirectly to its own sensations of harmony but ratherimitating those of the soul, which cannot move of itself.For classical expression theory, the body does not move

in a way that could characterize its unique nature as abody. This is because dancing imitates the euphoria ofthe soul's sympathy with the impression music makeson it. In this view, dance translates an unobserved,"spiritual" experience. In a like manner, eighteenthcentury theorist Johann Jacob Engel pictured physicalexpression as the representation of the soul's thoughts:"Expression is simply the palpable representation of thesoul's propensity to think, and of the feeling with whichits perception is affected, that is to say, the state inwhich it is placed by the object of its presentcontemplation."9 Once expression is understood as partof the process of representation, it is clearly open totheoretical reflection.

While expressivity has been practiced and reflectedon in dance since the Italian Renaissance, it has alsoplayed a role inmodernist projects of the twentiethcentury where we least expect to encounter it.Considerits presence in the work of Merce Cunningham.Although his earliest choreography in the 1940s wasexpressive in the traditional sense,10 by the early 1950sitdistinguished itself by the dissociation of dance andmusic. InCunningham's choreography, music anddance functioned together yet were not a unit; no innerrhythmic correspondences allying bodily movement tometer were premeditated. "The two co-exist," he wrote,"as sight and sound do in our daily lives."11

Cunningham accomplished this by applying JohnCage's ideas on chance procedure to his choreographicvocabulary. Chance procedure involves the charting ofall possible movement options prior to theirarrangement. Thus chance dictates the combinations ofknown variables, each of whose possible appearanceshas been foreseen. What is unforeseen, and still left tochance, is the sequence of the combinations. "When Ichoreograph a piece by tossing pennies?by chance,that is?I am finding my resources in that play, which isnot the product of my will. . . ,"12Cunningham applied

5. Sparshott, Off the Ground, p. 156. Both Konstantin Stanislavskiand Isadora Duncan made frequent reference to expression theory.Stanislavski's description of Duncan's dance shows how the Russiantheater director apprehended expression theory as a spectatorexperience leading back to the visual origin of sensation: "Iwatchedher during her performances and her rehearsals, when her developingemotion would first change the expression of her face, and withshining eyes she would pass to the display of what was born in hersoul" (Stanislavski quoted in Isadora Duncan, My Life [New York:

Garden City Publishing Company, 1927], p. 168).6. Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, Trattato dell'Arte del Bailo di

Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (Bologna: Presso Gaetano Romagnoli,1873), p. 31.

7. Guillaume Colletet, preface to "Le Ballet de l'Harmonie," inPaul Lacroix, Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III ? Louis XIV(Geneva: J.Gay et fils, 1868), vol. IV, p. 209 [translation mine].

8. Ibid., pp. 208-209.

9. See Johann Jacob Engel, /efees sur le geste et l'action th??trale(1795; reprint Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), p. 68 [translationand emphasis mine].

10. See Merce Cunningham, "The Functions of a Technique forDance," in The Dance Has Many Faces, ed. Walter Sorell (New York:

World Publishing Company, 1951), pp. 250-255.11. Merce Cunningham, "Choreography and the Dance," in The

Creative Experience, ed. Stanley Rosner and Lawrence E. Abt (NewYork: Grossman Publishers, 1970), p. 176.

12. Merce Cunningham, "The Impermanent Art," in EstheticsContemporary, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus,1978), p. 311. This essay was originally written in 1955. According



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Franko: Expressivism and chance procedure 145

Figure 2. Merce Cunningham rehearsing or improvising,probably in the early 1950s. His concave upper body suggestsa nonironic contraction, the space of inwardness later to berejected. Photo: G. Mogget. Courtesy of the Dance

Collection, The New York Public Library for the PerformingArts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

chance procedure to composition in order to eliminatehis own intention as a choreographer (fig. 2). Thiswould ensure that music and dance would not reinforceone another emotionally unless it happened byaccident. He dissociated dance from music to thedegree that the latter might no longer furnish theanimus for dance. Chance procedure was meant toensure that no inflection of movement, no intentionalallusiveness, would creep into dance. At issue wereboth how a dance was produced and how itwasreceived.

Cunningham's approach to composition and thepresentation of dances necessarily rejects more than aconventional image of "dancing to music"; itassails theclassical expression theory on which that image isfounded. Expression theory sees movement as rootedinitially in emotional sensation, just as talking is initiallyrooted in the meaning that conscience bestows onwords. In fact, talking is the closest thing in language toexpressive movement in dance. Music and dance,thought and words, form organic wholes in expressiontheory despite their functional distinction. WhenCunningham dissociates music from dance, he doesintentional violence to expression theory: he effectivelypries physical sensation loose from the emotionalimpression that purportedly caused it. To sever thetraditional contact between music and dance is to severthe continuity between feeling and the body's theatrical

3

to James Klosty, the very first use of chance operations inCunningham's work occurred in the Sixteen Dances for Soloist andCompany of Three (1951). See Klosty, Merce Cunningham (NewYork: Limelight, 1986), p. 13. In this work, choreographic sequencewas determined by artificially imposed options, whereas dance andsound were linked only by their matching length. When explaining

what chance operations such as tossing coins or dealing cards canbring to the process of composition, Cunningham repeatedly usesterms such as "field of juxtaposition," "multi-vision," "events,""unlinear thinking." Some of these phrases have lent themselves asnames to dances. For Cunningham, the removal of intention clearlycorresponds in a significant manner to the suppression of the spatialframe. Or we might say that the suppression of the spatial frameserves to index the implicit theory according to which chanceprocedures have been used to remove personal intention.



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presence. Thus physical movement would no longer"force out" (express, or press "ex"?outward): that is,no longer manifest subjective states outwardly.Nevertheless his view of dance does not precludesubjectivity, the existence of a particular inner self. Iwill argue that Cunningham's dissociative practiceshave come to be interpreted as a far more radicalalternative to expression theory than his writing andperformances actually indicate. Iwill suggest thatchance procedure as used by Cunningham, until acertain point in his career,13 purveys expressivist values,albeit in an original way (fig. 3).Consider what he himself has said. Cunninghamseems to relate what happens in his dances to hispersonal experience of the world. Referring to theflashing lights of Winterbranch, Cunningham reflected,"where do those lights come from inmy experience?... I thought about this a long time, and one of thethings itcould have been is that we toured so often in a

Volkswagen bus, driving at night, at two in the morningand seeing lights from on-coming cars illuminatingsomething, a person, a tree, or whatever, constantlychanging."14 Inother words, things that?even ifonlycoincidental^?are an expression of his life find their

way into his dances.Because he hasn't put his own intentions in the

work, he is able to claim that itmeans whatever theaudience sees in it. In an interview of 1970,Cunningham spoke of his audiences' violent reaction toWinterbranch.^5 Because the piece produced a diverseyet extreme audience reaction, the choreographerstated that Winterbranch may have been aboutviolence, or may have displayed violence convincinglyto the audience. Although itwas not his professedintent to express violence, he nevertheless noted theprevalence of violence in contemporary American lifeas a corollary to the adequacy of his interpretation. Theartistic intent that one might presuppose in a more

conventionally expressive choreographer is hereassigned to the realm of the artist's unconsciousmotivation. Yet the audience's instinctual reactionfurnishes the communicative rapport presupposed byexpression theory. The "sensation" resulting from the"impression" may no longer be located in the artist'ssoul. Indeed, it is now "out there," in the world ofcommonly shared experience. But all can feel it?thatis, are its victims or observers?and construe its"expression" accordingly. However questionable thiscommentary about his own work might be,Cunningham is still grappling with the same issues thatexist in expression theory. Instead of saying "We aresensitive souls whose physical movements reflect whatwe feel within," his dancers work at dissociatingthemselves from stimuli. In fact, Cunningham's dancesare often meant to show disjunction just as classicaltheater represented feelings that, however disturbing,unified experience.With regard to other works, Cunningham has evokedsuch stimuli as the new ways information is received inthe modern world, the interruptive experience oftelevision, the quality of contemporary life, and thenature of scientific discovery. His reception theorycould be charted as follows:

. , . ContemporaryInformation ?? n *?? MovementReceptivityContemporary receptivity should be understood as awillingness to acknowledge feeling without the need tointernalize itand subsequently manifest itoutwardly.This expressive formula no longer reflects the innerresonances of experience in the dancer, but experienceis nevertheless essential to the production and the

reception of any Cunningham piece, because theformula is not wholly fortuitous. That invisible entitythat expression theory calls the "soul"?prime receptorof all impressions?is somewhere intact.The early Cunningham work of the 1950s clearlyresisted forms of emotivism associated with modern

dance of the 1940s. While expressivity was present inCunningham's work in the 1950s and 1960s, he shiftedits locus from the dancer as transmitter of feelings to themovement itself. During those decades, Cunningham'swork served indirectly to critique expression as a formof modernist hysteria. Expression, in his work, emergedfrom movement without any emotional overlay. Inotherwords, his aesthetic did favor expression, althoughwithout intention. "I could see," he remarked to SusanSontag in an interview of 1986, "who and what [the

13. It is difficult to pinpoint when his work began to beinterpreted with increased personal neutrality by his own company,

although this probably had happened by the late 1970s.14. Merce Cunningham and Jacqueline Lesschaeve, The Dancer

and the Dance (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), p. 106.Cunningham continues, "That's not something I thought of when Imade the dance, but it's inmy experience."

15. "Music and Dance and Chance Operations: A ForumDiscussion," recorded and broadcast 16 February 1970, by radiostation WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts. Present were composerRobert Stearn, dancer Marianne Simon, and interviewer Anita Page.



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Figure 3. Merce Cunningham in Lav/sh Escapade (1956), one of the "strange, seemingly psychologically oriented, soloworks," according to composer Earle Brown in James Klosty, Merce Cunningham, p. 76. Photo: Louis Stevenson.Courtesy of the Dance Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and TildenFoundations.

dancers] were through what they were doing."16In his conversations with Jacqueline Lesschaeve,

Cunningham asserted that "movement comes fromsomething, not from something expressive, but fromsome momentum or energy."17 Although he thinks ofmovement as being only about itself, he does not goso far as to assert that movement generates itself.

Cunningham's movement comes from energy just astraditionally expressive movement comes from innerturmoil, euphoria, or some such "sensation" caused byan "impression." Movement is still a reaction to thehidden action of an impression. Yet, for Cunningham, it

is in reaction to a physical rather than to a spiritualreality, to energy rather than to the soul. Because heaffords dance movement an origin in the physical ratherthan the spiritual, Cunningham secularizes expressiontheory, or aestheticizes it.

Cunningham also speaks of "the exhilarating momentthat this exposing of the bare energy can give us."18Such moments experienced by the performer areequivalent to visual moments for the audience. Theystand forth from the continuum of movement asaesthetic summations, recognized kinesthetically andimprinted on the gaze as memorable. Roland Bartheslikens this "pregnant moment" to Gotthold EphramLessing's aesthetic of painting in Laoco?n. "Painting canuse only a single moment of an action," writes Lessing,"and must therefore choose the one which ismostsuggestive and from which the preceding andsucceeding actions are most easily comprehensible."19In this view, painting should depict a summation ofmoments that encapsulates in contiguous space what is

16. As Sontag points out in that same interview, Cunningham hastwo ways of explaining his aesthetic concerns: he speaks in a very

workmanlike fashion of pedestrian human movement as a given thatcan be constantly manipulated out of a sort of inspired and tirelesscuriosity on the part of the choreographer; on the other hand, he isgiven to saying that dancing provides a unique amplification ofenergy, making reference thereby to its transformative capacity. Thefirst discourse purveys an egalitarian ideology whose rhetoric all butsubmerges the second discourse. Iam arguing that the second, rarerdiscourse, one of detached expressivism, is secretly more central toCunningham. The first discourse in its very pragmatism has becomean overlay (much as the dreaded additions of expressive attitude) that,after its initially liberating effect, may have paradoxically contributedto an anti-intellectual climate inAmerican dance criticism.

17. Cunningham and Lesschaeve, The Dancer, p. 68.

18. Cunningham, "The Impermanent Art," p. 311.19. Gotthold Ephram Lessing, Laoco?n, trans. Edward Allen

McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), chap. 16,p. 78. See also Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," inImage-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press,1977), pp. 69-78.



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usually evident only over time. In a similar manner,Cunningham calls those dancing moments exhilaratingthat sum up, as itwere, an invisible energy source in acognitive flash: in that moment, the energy source ofdancing is as good as expressed. Inother words,Cunningham denies the expressive model even as heconserves that model's theoretical profile. Indeed, helinks energy to feeling when he calls it "a source fromwhich passion or anger may issue in a particular form,the source of energy out of which may be channeledthe energy that goes into the various emotionalbehaviors."20 This is to say, it seems to me, that thebody can have a direct rather than imitative rapportwith emotional behaviors as long as itattends tosomething more fundamental than emotion, while justas differentiated. InCunningham's view, different formsof energy are as differentiated as forms of emotion. Inhis fundamentalism, he is still concerned withcorrelating an outer manifestation to an inner essence."Lack of fullness in a particular movement," he adds,"or exaggeration of a movement outside the particularlimits of its own shape and rhythm producesmannerism, Ishould think."21 One could not applysuch aesthetic criteria without some covert, or evenunconscious, notion of correlating an outer

manifestation to an inner source.22

IIA viewing of Cunningham's company in 1990reveals that the project, which emerged in the 1950s, isstill fully intact. Yet the apparent modus operandi ofthat project has subtly altered: the Cunningham dancerof the 1980s does not manifest the detached

subjectivity in the way his or her predecessors did.23 Let

me flesh out this point by describing a work of the mid1960s that contained symptoms of both the "pre-" andthe "postrevolution" performance style.In 1966 John Cage recited anecdotes toMerceCunningham's choreography inHow to Pass, Kick, Falland Run, eliciting supercilious titters from theaudience.24 Despite the broad appeal of Cage's text, thechoreography it accompanied was not intendedhumorously and showed formal continuity withCunningham's earlier work; indeed it asserted randomstructure as vigorously as had the Suite by Chance of1953.25 Thus, more than a decade after Cunningham'smost radically experimental period, he continued tokeep the structure of his compositions palpablyarbitrary. In the 1950s, audiences gave vent to shockedoutrage at these experiments.26 In contrast, audiences ofthe 1960s showed a complacency in response tochoreographic randomness. Had Cunningham'saudience come of age, or had his work taken on thecharacter of an accepted and elaborate in-joke?Itwas at approximately this time that the doctrinaireaspect of Cunningham's work, the so-called"Cunningham revolution," took shape in the media.This surely coincided with the first federal governmentfunding of modern dance and the first modern dancefestival on Broadway, funded by the Ford Foundationand the New York State Council on the Arts in 1968. Atthe time of this increased public attention, Cunninghamwas identified as one of the five "major" modern dancechoreographers.27 Yet, from a retrospective point ofview, the "revolution" was more a media event than an

20. Cunningham, "The Impermanent Art," p. 311.21. Ibid., p. 313.22. These are the terms with which Louis Althusser and Etienne

Balibar explain the Leibnizian concept of expression: "It presupposesin principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner

essence, of which the elements of the whole are then no more thanthe phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle of theessence being present at each point in the whole, such that at eachmoment it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation:such and such an element . . . = the inner essence of the whole."See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London:Verso, 1979), pp. 186-187. Thus Cunningham's dance is notauthentically "un th??tre ?nerg?tique," that is, one that replaces apolitical economy with a libidinal economy, as Jean-Fran?ois Lyotardprematurely claimed in Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: ChristianBourgois, 1980), p. 96.

23. Whether the current performance style had always been the

desired end for which the true means have only recently been found,or whether it betokens a regrettable loss of personality, will continueto be argued. Deborah Jowitt's recent comments on this subjectconfirm my point of view in this article. "Not all of Cunningham'sdancers," she writes, "especially in recent years have been/are able to'allow' the power of the instant to speak through them, and mayinstead express their nervousness, their preoccupation with being

correct, or even their desire to remain neutral" {Time and theDancing Image [New York: William Morrow, 1988], p. 285).

24. Iam referring to the New York premiere of that work at theHunter College Playhouse in December 1966. At those performances,How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run was danced by Merce Cunningham,Carolyn Brown, Barbara Lloyd, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, AlbertReid, and Gus Solomons, Jr. John Cage sat at a table stage right,talking and appearing to drink champagne.

25. Suite by Chance worked with the random structuring of adance as early as 1953. See Merce Cunningham, Changes: Notes onChoreography (New York: Something Else Press, 1968).

26. See Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors. FiveMasters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp.239-246.

27. Together with Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and



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authentic description of Cunningham's art. Comparinghis company's performance style in the 1950s and early1960s with that of the 1980s, one can effectively weighthe negative impact of the "revolution," and theprestige itgarnered, on the performance of his work.

Cunningham had resisted expressivist values in favorof movement that relied on a dancer's unique executionof it. This execution was not repeatable?in the senseof transferable from one dancer to another?because,unlike choreography based on expression theory, it inno way relied on a fixed code of emotional values inmovement. Only a particular dancer could convey aparticular movement as meaningful and elicit aparticular response. "Cunningham asked each dancer tomove in conformity with his or her particular physicalconstitution."28 This aesthetic has ultimately beenmanipulated and, I think, mutilated, by the dancerhaving become one who reflects chance procedurerather than one who copes with it.29The Cunninghamdancer is now too frequently a body devoid ofintention, agency, and interiority, a body primed tomirror the dictates of chance. Remembering theaudience reaction to How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run in1966, it is tempting to hold them responsible for theeffects of the Cunningham revolution. A subtle anddelicately balanced aesthetic stance was hardening intoa choreographic dogma of reduced flexibility andresonance.

Deborah Jowitt has suggested that since the 1970s"the widening age gap between [Cunningham] and theother dancers affected his relationship to them.Somehow, either itwas harder for them to reveal theirindividuality through the steps he gave them, or harderfor them to reveal to him the individuality that would

enlighten him when he was making up the steps."30 Bythe 1970s, Cunningham may have become more distantfrom his dancers, growing more interested in technicaluniformity at the expense of individuality. Yet it is

difficult to say whether the differences Iam describinghere are attributable to audience reception or qualitiesintrinsic to the work. This isone of the most profoundand nettling issues that dance history and theory has towork out methodologically. Consider that Cunningham'schoreography in the 1950s read as both more and lessshocking than itdoes today in the 1990s. Itappearedmore shocking in that itviolated a context ofexpressivity far more influential and pervasive in the1950s than at present. As Jill Johnston wrote in heressay "The New American Modern Dance," "Themodern dance establishment of the 1950's apprehendedCunningham's depersonalized concentration asdehumanization."31 Conversely, Cunningham'schoreography also appeared less shocking in the 1950sbecause from that place the motif of incommunicationcould often be read as a statement on the community ofabsolute individuals.32 This is to say, in the 1950s theaccidental concordances between dance and music thatchance procedure afforded were actually the point ofthe performance, rather than the intention categoricallyto avoid them in the name of an ideology of disunity."Cunningham's philosophy," wrote composer Pauline

Oliveros, "allows a natural rather than an imposedrelationship to arise between the music and thedance."33 Thus the unpremeditated occurrence of an

expressive fit between dance and music was of a highernatural order, indeed contained some message about ahigher order beyond individual control. I take thesubsequent mutilation or unhappy manipulation of thateffect as a loss of the human factor in the equation. Iassume that the loss of personality is a phenomenon ofbroader sociological origin wedded to particularinstances of artistic choice. In 1979 David Vaughanwrote that Cunningham had become more interested in"mass effects," and was creating pieces inwhich"individuals do not stand out even when everyone onstage is doing something different."34 However,

Vaughan's claim that "Cunningham does in fact want'character' from his individuals in their way of movingAlwin Nikolais. The hierarchizing of a dance world previouslydistinguished by rugged individualism was facilitated by the creationof an Association of American Dance Companies, a "coordinating"organization "designed to act as the official voice for dance,especially in the area of application for federal funds for culturalprojects." See "New Dance Body Formed in June," Dance News(September 1966): 4.

28. Irving Sandier, The New York School (New York: Harper &Row, 1978), p. 166.

29. By this Ido not refer to indeterminacy, the extension ofchance procedure to the dancer by allowing him or her to determine

when certain movements will occur,30. Jowitt, Time, p. 297.

31. See Jill Johnston, "The New American Modern Dance,"Salmagundi 33-34 (Spring, Summer 1976): 162.

32. This thesis is advanced convincingly by Vernon Shetley in"Merce Cunningham," Raritan 8, 3 (Winter 1989): 73.

33. Klosty, Merce, p. 79.34. See David Vaughan, "Merce Cunningham," Performing Arts

journal III, 3 (Winter 1979): 4. This article appears to have beenwritten in response to accusations of the new "anonymity" ofCunningham's dancers and in defense of the Cunningham companyas itwas then constituted.



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primarily"35 begs the very question Iam raising here.For Iargue that a qualitative difference, produced overtime, occurs inCunningham's particular concept ofexpressivity. There can be no doubt that Vaughan thinksof individuality in a radically reduced field of relativedifferences while the desideratum of character frommovement seems entirely contrary to Cunningham'sphilosophy according to which itemerged naturally.This could be considered a minor issue only by thosewho undervalue the fact of performance.

Indeed, the performance qualities that enabledCunningham's choreography to achieve itsoriginal

impact are too quickly forgotten. What distinguishedCunningham's earlier work was the inner intensity withwhich seemingly arbitrary acts were danced. At thattime, his dancers seemed to move on the borders of avolatile sensitivity. This arresting contrast between the

way a piece was structured and the quality of the actsconstituting it, particularly inCarolyn Brown, at othertimes inViola F?rber, and, less overtly, inCunninghamhimself, gave that work its unique imprint. MarciaSiegel has remarked that Cunningham wasn't originally"aiming for any standard company veneer or attitude,which is one reason his older works are so hard torevive. Neither he nor anyone else can seem to pictureother people inCarolyn Brown's roles, or Viola Farber'sor his own." Siegel goes on to associate, correctly Ithink, the unique presence of the dancers with dramaticintensity: "Because they don't play roles other thanthemselves, the drama of their movement experience isconstantly in play on the Cunningham dancers' faces"(fig. 4).36 Itwas as if the choreography itself was the"impression" received by the dancers as they articulatedit. They remained skeptical of allowing that"impression" to become sensate, withholding it fromthe movement. One may have seen expression withoutintention in the dancers' movement, as Cunninghamclaimed one might, but one also saw unexpressedintention in their faces. That ismy point. Cunningham

dancers, in their depersonalized concentration, werestill people with intent. Because they did not play rolesbut remained resolutely themselves, Cunningham'sdancers did appear as psychological and social agents.Nevertheless, in their performance, they refrained fromthe demonstrative exercise of those capacities.In her essays on dance, Cunningham dancer CarolynBrown has stressed the dramatic impact on theperformers themselves of Cunningham's early works,even of those based on chance procedures. Of UntitledSolo she writes, "Though it is choreographed by chanceprocedures, the atmosphere is clearly and intenselydramatic."37 What Cunningham had removed throughchance procedure was the narrative circumstance ratherthan the subjectivity of the dancer. His dancers didimpose their own imaginative order on the

choreography in a very subtle way, even as they heldtheir expressive selves in abeyance. That is,whileimposing no predetermined forms on their

choreographic tasks, they seemed to project a vigilanceabout how each task might correspond to their internalstate. The choreography was not performed as much astested or tried out with great expertise. They did not, inother terms, project what has since become a look ofpsychological "emptiness." Indeed, the quality of thedancer's gaze was an important element of the earlystyle. That gaze was intent, at times smolderinglyintense, while avoiding explicit dramatic statement.

Agency and intent were present in the dancers,although they may have consciously withheld thesequalities from their movements. Expression seemed toemanate inward rather than be manifested outwardly.The dancers assessed expressive process by their veryenigmatic presence, rather than flatly opposing thatprocess. They inferred a range of intentional objectswithout expressing them.38

35. Ibid., p. 5.36. Marcia B. Siegel, Shapes of Change. Images of American

Modern Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 323. Ido notmean to imply that Cunningham choreographed faces, althoughphotographs from the early 1950s suggest that he may have beenexperimenting with facial plasticity even as he initiated the firstchance procedure operations. His own face appears choreographedin Sixteen Dances for Soloist a nd Company of Three (1951). In the

solo for himself in Septet (1951), certain set expressions flickeredacross his face framed by a presenting action of his hands. I thank

Michael Bloom of the Cunningham Foundation for enabling me to seethe video of this solo of 1964.

37. Carolyn Brown, untitled essay inDance Perspectives 34(Summer 1969): 29. She continues, "An earlier solo, Root of anUnfocus, seemed to tell a story, to be about something (Merce deniesthis. . . .). But, at this time, both Cage and Cunningham were dealinginmore dramatic terms with regard to content ... the movement [of

Untitled Solo] itself is vibrantly dramatic." Paul Taylor, anothermember of Cunningham's original company, writes: "Presumably, thedances were not about anything, and as performers, we were toexecute rather than interpret. This puzzled me, because the dancesseemed to have subjects, or at least emotional climates, and because

Merce danced his own roles dramatically. Each of his movements, bethey sharp or soft, shouted or whispered, startled or stealthy, clearly

meant something to him" (Paul Taylor, Private Domain [New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1987], pp. 48-49).

38. In a broader sense, the sum of their actions are symptomaticof a theory whereby they deliberately bracket intentionality. Thus



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Figure 4. Merce Cunningham working with facial expressionin the first of his works to use chance procedures, SixteenDances for Soloist and Company of Three (1952). Photo:Gerda Peterich. Courtesy of the Dance Collection, The NewYork Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, andTilden Foundations.

Currently, Cunningham's performers appear visuallyhomogeneous with the media's understanding of his"revolution" inwhat seems to be an attempt toeliminate expressivist values entirely. Their movementreveals nothing about who they are; their presence isboth efficient and removed; their movement is inresponse to the "sensations" of arbitrariness.

Cunningham's later work no longer calls expressivistvalues into question: it has become inexpressive ratherthan antiexpressive.39

How to may have prefigured this change bydiminishing the questions about dancer and subtext?movement and intention?that made the earlier work soprovocative. In replacing music with talk inHow to,Cage was merely switching dissociative practices(fig. 5). Indeed, using talk as if itwere a musicalaccompaniment further stressed the independence ofmovement and sound. As in earlier work, anycorrespondences between talking and dancing in Howtowere accidental rather than intentional.40 Further,

each movement points outside of the dance to the egalitarian idealsof freedom that chance procedure has been chosen to foster. In thisview, emotional intensity would just be a residual aura clinging to ourperception of movement as human action, or a trace of the movefrom self to chance.

39. In Peter Burger's terms, it becomes neo-avant-gardist becauseit negates the avant-gardist intentions once inscribed in the work.

"Neo-avant-gardiste art is autonomous art in the full sense of theterm, which means that it negates the avant-gardiste intention ofreturning art to the praxis of life." Most interestingly, B?rger holds thatthis change can occur in the status of the work as product while theconsciousness the artist has of his activity may remain unaltered. Inthe case of Cunningham, the "status of the product" has much to do

with the dancers' minds and bodies, ultimately, with theirperformance. See Peter B?rger, Theory of the Avant-Garde(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 58.

40. "Each story in its telling would take a minute. [Cage] tells onan average of fifteen stories in the course of the twenty-four minutes,so there are lengths of silence as the dance continues. Using astopwatch, he governs the speed of each telling, a story with a few

words being spaced out over the minute, a story with many having afaster rhythm. Since from one playing to another playing of the dance



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Figure 5. Merce Cunningham and JohnCage inperformanceof How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run inAnn Arbor, Michigan,1965. Photo: Martha Keller. Courtesy of the CunninghamDance Foundation, Inc.

correspondences between movement and articulatedlanguage were implicitly spoofed by the title, whichimplied instructions for organized, culturally

programmed moves taken from football. The presenceof champagne and Cage's drawling diction immediatelybelied a connection between himself and theathleticism of the dancers beside him on stage.Ironically, this piece failed in part because the audienceinsisted on understanding iton their own terms. As

Richard Kostelanetz points out, "The dancersineffectively compete with John Cage's compellingonstage rendition of funny one-minute anecdotes."41How to could not successfully maintain talking anddancing as independent entities as music and dancingcould. Cage's recitation overpowered the dancers inpart because the audience related solely and directly to

the text.42 Rather than attaining an independence fromsurrounding media, dancing appeared diminished bythem. A later film of the work shows two speakers,John Cage and David Vaughan, instead of the originalone. There, at moments, when their speech overlapsand the thread of meaning is lost, one is free to attendto the dancing, and a more dynamic interplay betweendance and text emerges (fig. 6).

he never tells the same story at the same point in time, we cannotcount on it to relate to us" (Merce Cunningham, "Choreography andthe Dance," p. 184).41. Richard Kostelanetz, "Metamorphoses inModern Dance,"

Dance Scopes 5, 1 (Fall 1970): 12.

42. This is particularly evident in the film of 1968 of the work.The audience laughs only at the text that, despite its disconnectedfabric, it iswilling to take on as an intentionally funny text. Roger

Copeland criticizes similar critiques of How to by claiming that theybetray an ignorance of Cunningham's interest in an anti-WagnerianGesamtkunstwerk, one that would display disunity among, rather thana harmonious fusion of, the arts. Yet Icontinue to wonder whetherdisunity is automatically accomplished when conventional unity hasbeen thwarted. By conserving the nonrelatedness of dancing andtalking, Cunningham and Cage symbolically rejected Wagnerianconceptions of theatrical wholeness. Yet, by doing it the way they didin How to, they also unwittingly suggested a pre-Wagnerian model ofthe theatrical whole?composite spectacle of the late Renaissance?in

which the text effectively dominated. The very domination of the textsuggests a desire for unity and wholeness. See my Dance as Text:Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Res Monographs inAnthropology

and Aesthetics, (England and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press,forthcoming); and Roger Copeland, "Merce Cunningham and thePolitics of Perception," inWhat IsDance? Readings in Theory andCriticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 1983), pp. 307-324.



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The Cunningham revolution was to have done awaywith expressivist values and their tendency to imposepsychological meaning on movement. Despite that, thedancer's subjectivity was still important inCunningham's beginnings and is now reemerging as achoreographic issue. Yet the new expressionism isthoroughly different from what itwould have beenwithout Cunningham.43

IllIn 1975, photographer James Klosty compiled a bookof photos in tribute to Merce Cunningham. Many of

Cunningham's collaborators?dancers, composers, andpainters?wrote short essays or agreed to be

interviewed (fig. 7). Dancer Douglas Dunn contributeda poem that can be read as an ironic blueprint forchance procedure:Talking is talkingDancing isdancingNot talking is not talkingNot dancing is not dancingTalking is talking and not talkingDancing isdancing and not dancingNot talking is not talking and not not talkingNot dancing is not dancing and not not dancingTalking is not dancingDancing is not talkingNot talking is not not dancingNot dancing is not not talkingNot talking is not dancingNot dancing is not talkingTalking isdancingDancing is talkingDancing is talkingTalking isdancingNot dancing is not talkingNot talking is not dancingDancing is talking and not talkingTalking isdancing and not dancingNot dancing is not talking and not not talkingNot talking is not dancing and not not dancingDancing is not dancingTalking is not talking

j-Mji^jfl.^iftf"-KM?lfaHMNMMW'''',^?


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Not dancing is not not dancingNot talking is not not talkingNot dancing is not dancingNot talking is not talkingDancing isdancingTalking is talking.44This poem appears to chart the relations of

opposition, contradiction, and contrariness betweentalk and dance. What starts out in the poem as a binaryopposition between speech and movement, stressed bythe tautological assertions that "talking is talking" and"dancing is dancing," is seen in the course of the poemto be mutually self-inclusive. Thus the poem developsassertions such as dancing is and is not talking, anddancing is not not talking. At the precise center of thepoem, talking and dancing are equated. The poem thenworks itsway back out of that classical symmetry toreflect its initial polarization of talking and dancing in amirror reversal. At the center, however, the poemsuggests that somewhere along the spectrum of chanceprocedure you will encounter expression theory.Indeed, it is at the precise center of all the dissociative

options that expression theory itself materializes as an

option. Whether or not itwas originally intended to doso, Dunn's poem cleverly calls into question thereductive aspect of Cunningham's project. Itenvisionsaleatory movement as already embodying its opposite:meaningful talk and, by extension, expression.

Intentionally or not, Dunn reflects on chanceprocedure formulas applied to a work such as How to(fig. 8). The refusal to see verbalized sense as thesubtext of nonverbal action is, after all, at the heart ofchoreographic randomness. Without the tactic ofchance, subjectivity closes in on movement,determining all itsmeanings and options. Withoutchance, dance becomes a form of talk, a consciouscoping with meaning and communication. Dunn'spoem has the earmarks of a grid analogous to the chartsCunningham prepared before applying chanceprocedure to the vocabulary of a dance. Options areplayfully yet systematically charted for talking anddancing as if these two activities stood for a finitenumber of preselected choreographic phrases. Moreimportant, this poem reenacts chance procedure as itaffects the audience of a Cunningham dance. It is

clearly related to How to because that work placedtalking and dancing in dissociated contiguity. Dunn'spoem describes the effects of talking and dancingfalling or not falling together, corresponding and notcorresponding. Itcomments on chance procedure notby a random structure, but by recalling the logicallystructured series of options that precede the use ofchance (fig. 9).One can attribute this commentary to Dunn'sparodie impulse, but it is also true that art critically

3

Figure 7. Cunningham's dancers, faces averted, still remainisolated subjects escaping standardization inTread (1970).Douglas Dunn isat lower right. Photo: Theresa A. King.

44. Klosty, Merce, p. 39.



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Figure 8. "An attempt to imagine a form of human society thatreconciles individuality and community," in the words ofVernon Shetley from his article inRaritan, p. 73.Cunningham's How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run. Dancers:Carolyn Brown, Valda Setterfield, Peter Saul, Gus Solomons,Jr., Barbara Lloyd, Sandra Neels, Albert Reid. Photo: NicholasTreatt. Courtesy of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, Inc.

involved with its own theory is invariably humorous.Perhaps the poem can throw light on Dunn's ownchoreographic project. His work of the late 1980smakes ironic comment on the conventions ofexpressivity from within the Cunningham tradition.45 Inhis own solo in Light, O Tease (1987), in theconcluding group dance for the five performers ofMatches (1988), as well as scattered throughout the

solo piece Haole (1988),46 and to some degreethroughout the group work Sky Eye (1989), Dunndevelops an analytic?one might say somewhat selfparodic?but also critically self-conscious view ofexpression.47In the solo of Light, O Tease, Dunn appears to be thesite of emotional upheaval without narrativecircumstance. That is, there are no actions following alogical pattern, there is just movement and anguished,

although muted, vocalization. Through that movement,each emotion surfaces as a minor paroxysm, no soonerentertained than abandoned. Each instant is bothsaturated with "sensation" and short-circuited asexpressive gesture (figs. 10, 11). His bodyaccommodates the eruption of sensations as momentary

45. There are, of course, broader issues addressed by Dunn inthese works. The group works clearly examine the dynamics of malefemale relationships, as suggested by the text of Milton's Paradise Lostbehind the title Light, O Tease: "Communicating Male and FemaleLight, Which Two Great Sexes Animate the World."

46. This work specifically addresses a conventional set ofrelationships between dancing and music, although talking also

played a key role in it.47. Light, O Tease was first performed at Dunn's studio in New

York City on 14 April 1987; Matches premiered 17 March 1988, atthe Kitchen; Haole received itsworld premiere at the Whitney

Museum of American Art on 8 September 1988; Sky Eye was firstperformed at St. Mark's Church on 9 March 1989.



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Figure 9. Reacting to the onslaught of sensations with ironicabandon. Douglas Dunn, Michael LaSalata, Jane Townsend,Susan Blankensop, and Grazia Della-Terza in Dunn'sWildwood (1989). Photo: Beatriz Schiller.

pangs, but never allows them a conclusive conduittoward the surface as correspondingly meaningfulgesture. His body shudders and trembles in response toinner stimuli while never turning those stimuli intorecognizable, culturally encoded gestures. What isrecognizable is their channeling from an "inside" to an"outside" and their gradually increasing intensity. Dunnends the solo by moving about, fluttering his arms like

wings, thereby suggesting humorously and selfparodically that we have just seen the hatching of anexquisitely sensitive, highly vulnerable bird. The humorof this moment tends to undercut the issue raised bythe solo.

InCunningham's early work, there was a tensionbetween the dancer and the impersonal ?zedchoreographic task he or she performed. In contrast,Dunn conceived emotion itself as a choreographic

task.48 Cunningham's attempt to demystify theconventional rapport among music, feeling, andmovement should be understood as a way to escapesubjective closure. Dunn, on the other hand, questionsthat closure by reproducing the expressive fit ratherthan denying it. Nevertheless, none of the emotional"sensations" he seemed to experience were conveyedas expressive gesture per se. InDunn, the drama of"sensation" has been divorced from expression. Like the

Cunningham dancer, Dunn has no expressive

48. Another, although different, post-Cunningham tendency is toexperiment with emotion as if itwere another physical material. Thisapproach acknowledges expression theory while introducing a radicaldifference: the "hidden scene" is deprived of its originan/ andtranscendental status. In some of the work of Pina Bausch, forexample, impression and expression seem reversed. Despite therecognizable expressionism of the dance, dancers' identities takeshape in the wake of what they do or what is done to them. Thus thehierarchy of impression and expression is reversed and subjectivitybecomes a construct of action. This is the most interestingcontribution of what the Germans now call the "neue Sachlickeit" indance. In its direct use of materials, on the other hand, it seemsderivative of American happenings of the 1960s.



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Figures 10, 11. Emotion emerging without gestural forms to contain it inDouglasDunn's solo from Light,O Tease (1987). Photos: Beatriz Schiller.



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Figure 12. Scene from Douglas Dunn's Matches (1988), with Dunn and Susan Blankensop.Photo: Beatriz Schiller.

Figure 13. Dealing with intersubjectivity at a formal remove. Douglas Dunn andGrazia Della-Terza inDunn's Sky Eye (1988). Photo: Beatriz Schiller.



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intentionality. Unlike the Cunningham dancer, heappears to be the ready conduit of emotional impulse.In the final segment of Matches, although there wasoccasional hissing suggesting the impersonation ofdragons in keeping with the work's oriental motifs, nodominant expressive code?neither contemporary norhistorical?organized the dancers' movement inreaction to sporadic "sensations" (fig. 12). Thosesensations that evidently imbued them were actualizedhistrionically without being "expressed" in any legible

way. Nevertheless, the action of expulsing innersensation was more pronounced, more dramatic, thanin the earlier solo. Matches ended in a highly activeeffort on Dunn's part?subsequently joined by the otherdancers?to exorcise "sensation" without expressing it.This was the work's final ?mage. "Choreography," in theconventional sense of patterns of bodies moving in

space, appeared abandoned as the dancers, standingfairly close to one another and descending at times totheir knees, flailed about while vocalizing in varioussemigrotesque postures.In the examples just evoked, Dunn and his dancerspursued the task of emotion with considerable honestyand commitment (fig. 13). Its status as task wasevidenced by the duration of the scenes: a real emotionmight have exhausted its gestural gamut long beforeeither of the scenes described came to a close. Therealization of the passage of time accompanies anotherinsight: an emotional state does not have to be viewedas motivated by sensitivity to "impressions." Once theaudience is led past the first two options?"this is about

emotion," "this can no longer be about emotion"?thatis, once their expectations of emotional process havelapsed, they are left to examine the tokens of emotional

^^KM * ^a 9*^ --:?.v"-^^^B^^^^v IJ^^^^^^^^^V ^^^^^^^^^B

Figure 14. Cunningham in conversation with Marcia Siegel: "I remember [the early company] asbeing like a family. ... So Iwas very personally involved with the dancers. . . . It's no longer thesame kind of personal thing. Also, the dancers are different. . . it's harder to know them?harderfor me to know them as people. . . .And, of course, I'm older than they are, to begin with Butalso, that kind of connection simply doesn't exist as itdid originally" (Dance Ink, 1, 1 [May/June1990]: 5). Merce Cunningham Dance Company inPhrases (1984). Photo: Lois Greenfield. Courtesyof the Cunningham Dance Foundation, Inc.



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process. With the intentional uncoupling of time andfeeling, the audience is led toward a speculativereflection on the production of emotion itself. When therapport of gesture with emotion no longer seemsnaturally inevitable, other expressive codes becomelogically possible. Dunn induces his audience to reflecton just such an unpredictable gesture not yet come to

pass. His choreography presents it in a nascent state.Dunn's choreographic strategy, in combination withhis use of time, is particularly suggestive of a third,speculative moment according to which expressivitycan be redefined rather than simply revived or denied.This recuperation of emotion effectively points beyondthe ideological closure of opposites that determine theway we read emotionally charged movement. Classicalexpression theory defines emotional fields through polaropposites such as joy and sorrow, ecstasy anddejection, whereas Dunn eliminates gesturescorresponding to such polar opposites even as hemaintains their stimuli. In the terms of expressiontheory's model, the nature of Dunn's initial"impression" is unknowable because it is not

complemented by a gestural counterpart. He opensmovement and its emotional subtext to a range ofintermediate possibilities. By focusing on the body as aconduit of "sensations," Dunn reinterprets expressiontheory in a nonreactive manner. In so doing, hereinterprets Cunningham's relation to expression theoryby exploiting again its authentic connection to"sensation" but sidestepping the aporia of its negativemoment, the reductionism to which it has led.

One could say that Dunn points to an unexploredtheatrical organization of "sensation" by avoidingcompelling expressive formations. Emotion may bepresent without including it in the gamut, or mapping italong the spectrum, of any particular semantic fieldsuch as joyful/sorrowful (fig. 14). Dunn depletes therecognition factor of emotions by overexposing theirintensity without really subscribing to their form. Hisrecent work has moments that put us in visceral contactwith theory. Thus italso demonstrates that expressionneed neither be rehabilitated by rejecting theory, as

Siegel argues, nor discounted in the name of theory, asSparshott claims.

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