Dance Studies Colloquium: Susan Jones (Oxford University), “Gestural Remains: Confinement, Narrative, and Kinesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Residua’” 

Mark Nixon identified the ‘Residua’ as a group of texts produced during a discrete period of experimentation in Samuel Beckett’s prose writing, beginning in 1964 and continuing with a series of short texts “that concentrates on the workings of the imagination in order to construct geometrically defined ‘closed spaces’, in which human figures are placed or rather arranged” in apocalyptic habitats in a Dantean limbo. Movement in these spaces constitutes a mathematically calibrated form of action, executed with absolute precision of pace and rhythm. Beckett experiments radically with what might constitute the confinement by geometry of “the gestural”. His apparently arbitrary turn to the choreographic here supports an (often unacknowledged) political strain. When we consider Beckett’s “borrowing” from classical geometries in these texts in relation to early modern dance theory we illuminate a common philosophical tension of authoritarian imposition of form and figure (on the social group), with the individual pathos of human expression. In a bizarre way, in spite of their obsessively mathematical utterances, Beckett’s radical texts express through minute gestures, the very meaning of lyricism, and of the ‘passion of humanity’ that the eighteenth-century dance theorist, Noverre had demanded when he asked for a shift away from the stale ornamentation of balletic posing to the practice of narrative in ballet d'action. 

This event is open to the public and part of AIR.