The Logics of Actualisation

• LOU FORSTER on Dispositions Art 21 Fall 2010.

Sitting beside a photograph of the monumental University of Moscow building, Rémy Héritier points to an element which had gone unnoticed by most of the audience. Shortly after, he places his arm on the photocopier located in the exhibition space. The text he read just before appears on the photocopies he hands out to the audience — it was written on his forearm. These scenes, in which a document reveals its ability to encode information that had escaped the spectators, coexist with other moments where Rémy Héritier performs heterogeneous materials that can be linked back to his career as a dancer and choreographer or, instead, be read as a play on the spatial particularities of the site. He leaves the gallery and goes to the adjacent garden, climbs one of the trees and hangs from a branch for a few moments. The actualisation of the virtualities of the photographic documents thus exist alongside those of the architectural data or, further, those of the dancer’s “repertoire”. Joined together in a de-hierarchised fashion, these events play with what is indistinctly referred to as “actualisation”. In a previous work, the choreographer had already distinguished two acceptations of the word: “updating” and “revelation”. While, generally speaking, the first meaning designates the action effected by a re-presentation, the second refers to the presentation of the intelligible so prized by Plato. Rémy Héritier adds a third mode of actualisation here: differentiation. This operation designates the passage from the virtual to the actual. The choreographer thus pursues his exploration of the potentials of the performative act.