Abstract:

This article examines contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite’s celebrated work Flight Pattern (2017), created for the Royal Ballet, which depicts an unspecified group of refugees as allegory for the “human” condition. In striving to choreograph exile outside of place and time, Pite rewrites the refugee as a purely bodied condition of transience, and thus corporealizes what Alexander Weheliye calls a “travelling theory.” The work thus strategically obfuscates the political in the image of the refugee, serving a State-run stage; moreover, it downplays the significance of race to the refugee crisis in complement to a predominantly white company. Reading this dance against key texts of biopolitical discourse, I show how the refugee figures as a symbol of the magnitude of biopower and as such is ontologically tied to the notion of the population—yet the refugee is never engaged at the level of embodiment. Flight Pattern thus offers a critical intervention: how does the West envision the refugee as an individual body? On the dancerly body, this entails citations of Western concert dance’s conventions of aestheticized alterity, raising the specter of the “relatable abject”: a figure that is Other to its audience and yet invites their empathic projection. Flight Pattern thus raises important questions for researchers about the implications of aesthetic inquiry into biopolitical crises: what dance can capture—and what it erases—of the experience of refugitude and the struggle for recognition and legibility on the stage of international politics.

摘要：

本文探讨了当代编舞家克里斯托·皮特 (Crystal Pite) 为皇家芭蕾舞团创作的著名作品《飞行模式》(Flight Pattern )（2017 年），该作品描绘了一群未指定的难民，寓言着“人类”的状况。在努力编排超越地点和时间的流放时，皮特将难民重写为一种纯粹的短暂的身体状态，从而将亚历山大·韦赫利耶所说的“旅行理论”具体化。因此，这部作品战略性地以难民的形象混淆了政治，为国家运营的舞台服务；此外，它淡化了种族对难民危机的重要性，以补充以白人为主的公司。通过阅读这段与生命政治话语关键文本相对应的舞蹈，我展示了难民如何被视为生命权力规模的象征，并因此在本体论上与人口的概念联系在一起——但难民从未参与到具体化的层面上。因此，飞行模式提供了一个关键的干预措施：西方如何将难民视为一个个体？在舞者的身体上，这需要引用西方音乐会舞蹈的审美异性惯例，引发“相关的卑鄙”的幽灵：一个对观众来说是他者的人物，但却邀请他们产生同理心投射。因此， 《飞行模式》向研究人员提出了关于美学探究对生命政治危机的影响的重要问题：舞蹈能够捕捉什么以及它抹掉什么——逃亡的经历以及在国际政治舞台上为获得认可和可读性而进行的斗争。