ABSTRACT
This chapter marks an ontological break with the phenomenological approach to dance, as that which attributes the activity and agency of the dance to the dancer. Its aim is to open up corporeal thinking to the multiplicity of forces that constitute the dance, thereby to rethink what a body is and what a body does. To make this shift is to ‘demote’ movement subjectivity in favour of the activity of forces. The Nietzschean conception of force destabilizes the singular identity of things, putting in their place a more mutable and dynamic sense of that which happens. The dancer is also formed from these relations of force, a mobile formation to be found in the dancing, but not at its head. The chapter begins with an ontological reformulation of dance in terms of bodies and forces. According to this approach, the body is a momentary formation, a provisional resolution of relations of force. Klossowski’s reading of the body in Nietzsche will give way to Deleuze’s conception of the body as a formation of force. Deleuze’s approach is oriented here towards an account of dancing as the serial mastery of forces. The kinaesthetic interpretation of Deleuze’s Nietzsche moves through a range of examples to flesh out a conception of dancing beyond the plane of the subject.
