Dance and Code with Empathy: A Reading of Joana Chicau and Merce Cunningham

This paper argues that the specifics of dance as a language, as being beyond writing at the same time as being a form of writing itself, can be used as a tool to evidence an aesthetic of code that includes a direct empathy with a formal, machinic feeling and not a metaphor of this feeling. The paper focuses on two specific cases: the live-coding performance The Theatre of Re-Sources by programmer and dancer Joana Chicau, which concretely provides connections between dance and code through its exploration of distances, and the Cunningham Technique developed by choreographer Merce Cunningham, which rids movement of any affect to later free the body through movement, illustrating a relationship between the formal and the feeling. The uxtaposition of these two works not only proposes an aesthetic of code that transverses the problems of its formal language, but it also illustrates a possible methodology for a reading of this aesthetic that goes beyond the instrumental and the expert.