ABSTRACT
“This must be one of these projects where science meets the arts,” Bill Aitchison observes in Ivana Müller’s How Heavy Are My Thoughts (2004). 1 Müller’s performance is not a dance performance in the usual sense as no dance movements are performed on stage. Instead, How Heavy Are My Thoughts reports on Müller’s attempts to find an answer to the question: “If my thoughts are heavier than usual, is my head heavier than usual too?” Her question addresses the Cartesian distinction between the material body (res extensa) as part of the natural world and governed by physical laws, and the mind as a thinking entity (res cogitans) supposedly outside or distinct from the natural and material world. Critique of this distinction and the assumptions implied within it plays an important role in reconsiderations of the position of dance within the interdisciplinary field of artistic as well as scientific practices of research. How Heavy Are My Thoughts engages in a playful and humorous way with these developments and the modes of thinking informing them. These modes of thinking are part of what I will, later on in this essay, elaborate as the dispositif, or apparatus, through which Müller approaches the subject of her research and that informs her modes of thinking as well as her modes of conducting research.
