Concepts of time
in the contemporary performing arts

Bernard Bel

These were challenged in their claim for absolute and persistent references, and relegated to social constructs inscribed in verbal conventions and body attitudes. (The parallel with relativist views on space-time and the observer's status may not go unnoticed, although there was little interaction between sciences and the arts.)

This paper deals with time perception and conceptualisation in music, dance and drama from the viewpoint of an observer moving across several cultures, notably India and western Europe; a risky venture facing the dangers of ethnocentricity and globalisation.

A concept termed 'polychronicity' by various authors (Hall 1983, Grossin 1986) has been extensively explored by Euro-American stage directors and choreographers although it finds a meaningful justification in ancient Chinese wisdom. Similarly, 'cyclic time', an important foundation of Indian and African music, seems to be alien to western thinking in spite of earlier investigations by poets and philosophers in ancient Greece. Today, convergent works in psychology, history, anthropology, formal logic, physics, cosmology and philosophy are reframing concepts of time in a way that may provide artists with creative insights.

Writing about artistic processes in the context of an east-west dialogue is only fair after casting off prejudices about modernity and creativity. Whether a piece of art qualifies as 'innovative' or 'conventional' depends mainly on cultural perceptions of change and motivations for asserting 'modern' or 'traditional' values. Implications of this statement have been exposed in detail elsewhere (Bel A. 1993, Bel B. & A. 1992, 1996). The present study is more concerned with the compositional practice of musicians, choreographers and stage directors, than with the stylistic categorisations they may claim or refute. In this domain, industrial societies seem to have invested more time (and money) on innovative art than young nations capitalising on their pre-independence cultural heritage. However, this tendency might be reversing due to the dynamics of development in eastern countries while there is a step back of institutional support to individual artists in Europe and north America.

Compositional work may not be limited to the design of stage sets, costumes, lights, sound tracks, etc., completed with the 'recycling' of precomposed material. Unfortunately, this is still a common situation in India. Choreographic and musical works may be produced in two weeks whereas the same might require at least three months of full-time work in western professional circles. The blame is partly on music/dance institutions imposing unrealistic deadlines to their staff artists. Besides, most schools are solely concerned with training young artists as performers, ignoring composition, stage direction or choreographic techniques which only a few gurus seem to have mastered.

In spite of this gloomy picture, recent years in India witnessed an increasing interest in reflexive work on the part of dancers, actors and musicians. This has given way to fruitful cultural cross-fertilisation in a multidisciplinary set-up. Indeed, these attempts remain marginal due to social and economical difficulties which unestablished artists are faced with (all over the world). It remains that there is space for a new wave of creativity to take place, a creativity that may not go wasted in the expression of cultural stereotypes since the issue would be the deconstruction of sound, human movement, space and time in a renewed aesthetic perspective.

This should not sound over-optimistic in a country which gave birth to some of the brightest brains of the world. Institutions, notably art schools and festival organisers, do have the keys opening multiple gates to creativeness; all they need is a political determination to take the risk.

Deconstruction

The word 'deconstruction' has often been abducted by western artists to designate a mere rejection of formal structures, notably narrative components. A comprehensive account of Jacques Derrida's (1982) enigmatic statements may be found in Monelle (1992:307-ff). Derrida pointed out a fallacy in human thought arising from biased oppositions. For instance, opposing modernity to tradition may implicitly valorise the former against the latter.

Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated. (Derrida 1982:329)

Viewing modernity as 'a sort of tradition' would highlight the fact that the dominant term (modernity) is subordinated to the 'marginal' one (tradition): a devastating insight into cultural biases. Mukund Lath (1988) explored implications of his statement of 'the modern' being part of the western 'tradition'.

By displacing attention to the 'unimportant', the marginal, and to the space between form and experience (sign and meaning), the deconstructive approach provides a subversive ground for destabilising mental categorisations perceived as 'irrevocable' after years of training in music or dance. The case of time concepts will serve as an illustration.

The desconstruction of unity/multiplicity: 'polytheist' awareness

Rhythmic constructions in north Indian music and dance lay stress upon an hierarchical opposition between unity and multiplicity. Whereas multiplicity may be mechanically produced by the superimposition of several periodical or quasi-periodical structures (among which the basic structure of tala), unity is organically ascertained by the concluding point of sam, which in turn bounces to further developments of the musical 'discourse'.

The climax of sam emphasises cultural values in the world outside the frame (Monelle 1992:310): harmony, balance, beauty, completeness, connections with invisible forces and so forth. Dancers, for instance, are expected to appear as heroes and heroines even when performing evil characters. Similarly, Indian music (both classical and filmi) seems devoid of rash dissonance, incertitude, despair and depressive moods in general.

In the late 20's, western contemporary dance rejected the heroic expression which had been predominant in classical ballet. It gained popularity in depicting 'ordinary' characters, often reflecting, and perhaps exorcising, a certain social pessimism. This should not be mistaken for a futile exercise of artists living in a secure and gratifying environment: for instance, the Japanese contemporary butoh style emerged from a 'physical' protest against the Hiroshima horror. It later evolved as a fusional dance form, notably in France under the influence of writings by Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille.

Because of the dominant anti-hero tendency in western performing arts, classical Indian music and dance are still perceived as exotic forms by western audiences and cultural establishment, in spite of their attempts to respond to expectations of the modern world. As an outsider, I find it very hard, for instance, to appreciate the performance of modern kathak dancers addressing modern themes with gestures borrowed from Radha-Krishna stories. Nor do I subscribe to claiming minimalist forms of bharatanatyam (with armless movements on eight directions and sickening binary rhythmic cycles) as 'the' avant-garde Indian dance form...

It may be clear that heroic expressions on the Indian stage are direct consequences of the biased unity/multiplicity dichotomy sustained by time structures. If the opposition is reversed, following a deconstructive approach, then unity appears as subordinated to multiplicity. This relates directly to James Hillman's (1989) statement on 'polytheist' consciousness according to which the one is contained as one among the many and within each of the many. If choreographic and musical developments are no longer aiming at unity (sam) as the inescapable conclusion, then their narrative and argumentative dimensions may be shaken. Again, Artaud (1964:175):

The secret of theatre-in-space is dissonance, the displacement of timbres and the dialectical disjunction of expression.

Choreographic work Zindegi by Andréine Bel (1992) was deliberately composed on this deconstructive basis. The piece was inspired by a ghazal written by Badru Nisa Biban, an 'ordinary' house-wife remembering her past expectations and delusions, with a dominating feeling of alienation (Thiesen 1988). This called for expressive techniques evoking frustration and despair through the fragmentation of personality.

It is easy to figure out (and indeed much less evident to perform) that in the absence of the constraint on sam several simultaneous rhythmic developments may be perceived as independent 'flows' of time with occasional crossings that appear as unintentional, hence non-discursive. We call this 'polychronicity', opposed to 'polyrhythmicity' in which precedence relations remain clear. A certain degree of polychronicity appears in (musical) thumri. Melodic developments are chiselled in such a flexible manner that their temporality seems to detach itself from the more steady accompaniment of the tabla. For instance, Kishori Amonkar's Koyaliya Na Bolo Dar Dar (HMV 6TC 04B 3916) was used in a passage of Zindegi. In the choreography, displacements of time and signification were pushed further. The choreographer worked out several simultaneous 'tracks' of gestures (based on 'secondary' centres of movement) with fortuitous crossings on accentuated beats. Although this approach has often been used in western choreography and theatre, so far it was implemented by groups of performers. In solo dance, the dissociation of time and signification layers radically modified the dancer's perception of herself, thereby enacting a 'polytheist' self-awareness.

[...] Dance always exposes itself as the mad quest of an individual body unavailingly, yet persistently, attempting to disprove its apparent unity and identity, in favour of the multiplicity, diversity and discrepancy of its acts. (Bernard 1990:69)

Polychronicity: from causality to synchronicity

Assuming a certain degree of polychronicity in the rendering of musical thumri should not be taken as a statement on musical structure per se. If listeners tend to perceive time as 'multilayered' when precedence relationships become uncertain, this may only reflect their inability to understand the musical system. Similarly, the Indian shopkeeper dealing with several customers simultaneously may qualify as 'disorganised' in the eyes of a well-bred Englishman. The inaccuracy of precedence relationships results in a loss of sense-building causality which disrupts the discursivity (and irreversibility) of choreographic and musical developments.

There are many ways of dealing with polychronicity. A composer may start with a regular time cycle against which periodic or quasi-periodic developments produce polyrhythmic effects. At a later stage, regular parts are erased from the musical score, confusing listeners about the reference. Instances of this approach are audible in André Mouret's musical work Myriades (1992).

A radically different technique consists in randomly mixing several tracks of sound events. In the end of Zindegi a classical tarana was merged with a street recording containing bird calls, temple bells, road traffic, trains, etc... The first attempt was estimated 'right'. It was postulated that different starting points and fader settings would not produce anything more worthwhile. This belief in the first attempt being irrevocable is related to a western practice inspired by divinatory techniques, notably the Chinese I Ching. The oracle consists in throwing coins or arbitrarily dividing a pile of yarrow stalks to select one among 64 patterns (hexagrams) whose written comments are supposed to shed light on the practitioner's current situation and problems. There is no space for a 'mistake' since the exercise consists in allowing chance (or some 'spiritual agency') to take care of the selection.

The I Ching and similar chance devices were familiar to composer John Cage and his colleague Merce Cunningham, a leading figure in western contemporary dance. For instance, relying on the oracle made it possible to postpone important decisions until the time of performance. Last-minute choice and ordering of choreographic and musical fragments introduced an (often fulfilled) expectation of 'magical' touch into each performance, which seemed to possess 'qualities' of the peculiar moment and place. A stress was put on the uniqueness of this event through the reactivation of compositional processes that had become an integral part of the performance.

Cage and Cunningham went further when they composed music and dance separately (given only thematic and duration constraints) so that dancers would discover the sound track on stage for the first time. An audience sympathetic with eastern mystique would justify success on the basics of 'cosmic laws' or insights provided by the I Ching. Others might invoke telepathic communication between the designers and premonitory inclinations on the part of performers. The rationalist may of course argue that random choice does not require the arsenal of an oriental book written several thousand years ago. Nonetheless, faith in the book and its underlying Taoist philosophy might have been a strong incentive for artists to deal with chance data in a creative way.

Richard Wilhelm's translation of I Ching was prefaced by Carl Gustav Jung (1951). Experimenting with the oracle over more than thirty years in his research on psychotherapy, Jung introduced synchronicity as

[a connecting principle] diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers. (op.cit.:xxiv)

Our difficulty to cope with synchronicity seems to arise from a fetishist valuation of causality deeply rooted in western culture since the early age of Christianity (Raju 1993:8). Should causality and human free-will be defeated in real-life situations, then moral responsibility (and expectations of reward or punishment) would not make any sense. This 'need' for a causal substrate justifying moral principles led western theologians like Augustine, and later scientists like Newton, to 'choose' linear time against what they thought would be the only alternative, 'circular' time. Most surprisingly, the same tendency is still prevailing among renowned cosmologists like Hawking and Ellis (op.cit.:25).

It has not occurred to many that the concept of time underlying Newton's physics --the one nurturing common-sense today-- was 'superlinear', a reversible time with deterministic laws denying future-branching mundane time, and therefore moral issues. The fact that quantum mechanics endangered causality by introducing inescapable incertitude in sub-atomic world events still remains marginal in real-life situations.

Relying on causality and strict chronology as the only rational principles underlying 'natural' philosophy appears more as a psychological or cultural habit than a vital necessity. If we were not so concerned about event 'A' being the cause of event 'B', we would not care about their chronological order --a safe transgression since relativity theory is there to claim that event precedence depends on observers.

An example will clarify the issue of synchronicity. Recently, while shopping in a remote place of your home city, you met a friend who had been away for many years. An event with so small probability (and high gratification) requires an 'explanation': invisible driving forces, destiny, telepathy, a belief in collective psyche? Let us give it a second thought. How many unknown persons have you crossed in that street? How many 'non-events' occurred in your life? How many friends did you miss as they went to the wrong street on the same day, or the right street on the wrong day? In sum, any non-event becomes an event when there is a strong motivation to record it. While recording it we feel compelled to elaborate a valid proof that it was 'due to happen', forcing absolute causal laws on empirical, statistical connections. These laws cannot claim scientific validity since they are not falsifiable: by definition, the conditions of the experiment cannot be reiterated.

I am not advocating rationalist views denying telepathy and other unexplained phenomena. The point is only to challenge the doctrinaire interference of causality in our perception of mundane life. Resorting to synchronicity might be a healthy departure from a superstitious causality. This statement will sound obscene to persons educated in the (Newtonian) western culture, but it has the potential to fling open fundamental questions regarding time, memory processes, self-consciousness, will versus non-will... This might be an important doorstep to artistic creativity.

One ought not to go to cadavers to study life. (Jung 1951:xxix)

Causality and reversibility

During the 20th century, western music has been strongly influenced by formal approaches to composition and sound design. For instance, the atomistic theory of music ("melody is nothing else than a sequence of given sounds" --Vincent d'Indy) advocated by Schönberg and Webern led to a formal system (serialism) opposing other formal systems (classical harmony). These antagonist systems share a common 'causal' approach in that they constrain musical choices on the basis of past events. To this effect, the complete knowledge of temporal precedence is assumed, which rules out polychronicity.

Music formalism is not limited to composition using staff notation or computers: formal rules, although partly explicit, seem to govern melodic and rhythmic improvisation in the raga and tala systems of Indian music.

These formal musical systems are strongly subordinated to the arrow of time. Consequently, playing formal music in reverse time makes it sound alien and often 'unmusical' because our brain is not educated to deal with retrograde rules. Many of these systems of rules are nevertheless reversible. For instance, a formal grammar may be used to compose musically acceptable tihais starting from their conclusion, although its productions only make sense when played in the opposite direction. (A retrograde tihai grammar is so simple that it would make musicians dream that their brain may work anticlockwise.)

With Xenakis the concept of formalised music was extended to stochastic methods (using the computer) which we may view as a partial shift from causality to synchronicity. However, the new approach initially focused on the handling of very fine musical structures (clouds of 'micro-events') at the level of which sound design can hardly be dissociated from higher-level organisation. This makes it difficult to compare it with techniques working at the level of 'notes' or discrete 'sound-objects'.

If reversible rules are used for composing a musical work, then playing it in either time direction will sound 'musical'. However, this idea has not been much explored because it introduces unduly complex procedures for questionable reasons. A historical example is Bach's Crab Canon which sounds identical when performed either way. There are less known occurrences of reversible pieces, for instance parts of Giacinto Scelsi's Chukrum (Accord 201112). The third movement even rates outstanding if the tape is played on reverse time.

It is commonly believed that the random generation of musical events should produce sequences sounding equally good (or bad) in either time direction. This overlooks the fact that chaotic sequences display local 'regularities' (in terms of periodicity) that may not go unnoticed. Some random generators even produce sequences which, at the scale of evanescent memory, seem to follow (time-asymmetric) hidden rules. This property is notably exploited for introducing 'textures' in granular sound synthesis.

Cyclic versus linear time

Cyclic time seemed to be a predominant concept in ancient Greece, being associated with the recurrence of seasons, festivals, and the revival of human beings throughout generations (Vernant 1990:128). In the 'Golden Age' of humanity, the divinity considered as the very origin of cosmos, Cronos, was shown as a serpent curled on itself embodying ultimate permanence behind the appearance of changes. It was only around the 7th century BC that lyrical poetry started substituting this heroic ideal of permanence in cyclic time to a set of values directly connected with the affective life of individuals (ibid.). Simultaneously, the linear time of tragedy emphasised causality and the consequences of human and divine deeds. The rhythmicity of time found its expression in chronology instead of genealogies (op.cit.:115).

In Christianity, the idea of cyclic time was repeatedly opposed, after Augustine, as antagonist to that of redemption underlying moral law: Christ's resurrection could only occur once and for all. This paved the way to a historical comprehension of human evolution, later shared by Marxists, in which a precise binary earlier-later relation is required for causal inference. The fact that old Indian manuscripts cannot be dated may be less disturbing to a western student than uncertainty or contradictions in their chronological order...

The idea that cyclic time does not 'make sense' presupposes an observer outside the circle, comfortably travelling on some external linear (and even bidimensional) 'super-time'. Further, this observer knows everything about the entire cycle and may jump to arbitrary points, messing up causal relationships. For instance she may seduce her grandfather so that he won't marry her grandmother! But, then, why can't observers accomplish similar transgressions on linear time? It may be clear the argument against time circularity (even restated by famous scientists like Hawking and Ellis) contains the same fallacy as the one saying that the Earth must be flat otherwise some humans would stand upside down, i.e. assuming an absolute linear gravitational field.

Greek poets evoking the emblematic figure of Cronos were apostles of goddess Mnèmosunè (memory) whose inseparable companion was Lèthè (oblivion). These might be the essential 'ingredients' of a cyclic consciousness -- the observer on the circle -- by which oblivion overshadows the past and hinders the recognition of renewals (Grossin 1990:299). For instance, in traditional Indian cosmology, the cycle is so long (8.64 billion years) that it defeats present-day imaginable data storage techniques.

For similar reasons, slow readers might not notice the circularity of the present paper.

In musical or choreographic performance, the density of significant events is such that renewals may not produce the deception of déjà vu. Quoting Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Daniel Charles (1987b:10) claimed that

[...] an aesthetics refuting the fact that a [musical] work always remains startling when heard again -- in René Char's sense that "even repeated, the act is always untried" -- is not an aesthetics, but mere aestheticism.

Circular consciousness

In the training of Indian tala, musicians and dancers rely on counting beats as long as their perception remains linear. However, after a long practice they start 'sensing' the tala to the extent that they might guess a tihai development is going right or wrong without resorting to calculation. In fact, they loose the sensation of 'moving along a circle' when their consciousness itself becomes 'circular'. A similar experience may be drawn from the metaphor of 'sound as an image of time', listening to the repetitive sound of sophisticated drones like the Indian tanpura (Zuckerland, quoted by Charles 1987a:176).

Significantly, an ancient Greek word for circular ('folded-on-itself') consciousness was angulometis, an attribute that poet Hesiod associated with Cronos, the great regulator of the universe. Unfortunately, several scholars translated Cronos angulometis as "Cronos-the-one-with-twisted-thoughts" because he had used a sickle (presumably an iconic representation of the moon) to emasculate his father Ouranos (the Sky) who was fertilising Gaya (the Earth) in an unrestrained manner. Cyclicity as a necessity for cosmic regulation could not be stated more radically.

Resorting to a more temperate procedure, physicist Raju (1993) claimed that a microphysically structured time allowing some local tendency toward cyclicity might reconcile experimental and mundane views. Modern physics and cosmology are sources of insights for fascinating research in art. Our musical and choreographic work on Cronos (1994) was influenced by archaeological findings, a close look at Hesiod's text and popular cosmological theories.

Polychronicity in cyclic time

Time circularity may be combined with polychronicity. However, when the ordering of events becomes blurred it becomes difficult, if possible at all, to identify a point of origin and recurrent beat patterns. Therefore, cyclic polychronicity may not necessarily rely on strict recurrence ('supercyclic' time, Raju 1993:26). Some African drum performances sound puzzling to Indian musicians because of an underlying structure resisting their analytical attempts. In such situations the listener may qualify the structure as 'chaotic'. This statement may either be a metaphysical escape, or an instance of Kolmogoroff's definition of a chaotic sequence as one whose simplest description algorithm would not be shorter than the sequence itself... In any case, the chaoticity of a musical sequence stands as an initial hypothesis that the perceptive system will attempt to refute by looking for simple algorithms, always possible on finite sequences. A current strategy in the Indian context is to assume circularity, locate sam and identify the tala.

There is a popular association of 'black culture' (whatever it means) with 'excellence in rhythm'. Discriminatory statements of this kind (which often carry implicit negative appreciation) overlook differences between, for instance, some African and American black musicians. Peo Oertli, a percussionist with field work experience in Africa, once pointed out that an American will generally beat time with fingers or feet whereas this behaviour is rare in the traditional African context. He further suggested that the distinction may highlight the lesser importance asserted to countable stressed moments in a 'polychronic temporal environment'.

Polychronicity in traditional African music might be paralleled to 'polytheist awareness' in the sense that, according to Heijke (1993), in some parts of Africa the idea of an (undivided, indivisible) individual does not prevail as the human personality is the convergence of several components.

Returning to polychronicity in linear time

Greek Thucydide may have been a pioneer historian for his care in distinguishing facts from observed facts. Nevertheless he neither bothered to map them to precise dates, nor did he state their precedence relationships (Grossin 1990:299)... A musical counterpart may be found in the early musical scores of François Couperin (Servant 1992) which contain clusters of notes whose simultaneity or precedence relations are unclear.

Viewing polychronicity as a mere extension of polyrhythmicity would be reductive. At a perceptual level, polychronicity is characterised by the lack of some chronological information rather than a conceptual layering of time. Since the listener is unable to construct a reliable precedence mapping she or he may resort to imagining several independent 'flows' of time, each of which would satisfy the need for chronological, i.e. causal, ordering.

When precedence remains vague, the only 'meaningful' relationship is coincidence. This means that polychronicity in music/dance implies the same paradigmatic shift as resorting to synchronicity, rather than causality, in ordinary life. Polychronicity may therefore be one of the most challenging issues addressed by the performing arts in a global society torn apart between superstition and overstatements of rationalism. In dance and drama performance, it sheds light on many unforeseen modes of expression ranging from the causal ordering of events (narration, order) to uncertainty (non-sense, chaos). Concerned by the bearing of cultural representations of time on historical research, Grossin (1990:301) pointed out the radical change occurring in the 20th century, using words that make sense to artists only:

Classical industrial time, with its steady, quantitative and abstract flow, external to things and beings, a container unrelated to its content, is being replaced with qualitative, concrete, meaningful, multiple, diverse, heterogeneous and complex times able to overlap each other and to become entangled in combinations that are not reducible to chronological order.

Time reconstructed

Conceptualising time may open new paths for experimental work. But artists are less committed to 'experiments' than to poetic imagination. We should assign words almost the importance they have in dreams (Artaud 1964:145)... The maturation of concepts may therefore take place in the world of sensations, a relative one in which the experimenter-observer is free to invent genuine visions of space-time. Vernant (1990:136) pointed out a radical incompatibility between the intellectualisation of time and its perception: [...the latter] subtracts memory from the intellectual part of the soul and transports it back to the level of its sensitive part.

Composers Satie and Webern once ventured along these lines when structuring musical passages on duration -- rather than pitch -- intervals (Charles 1987a:172). Time may also stretch out indefinitely, as heard in works by Roberto de Simone, and perhaps halt in Debussy's expressive climaxes (Brelet 1949). Beethoven devoted a significant part of his life to the discovery of new temporal modalities (Esclapez 1993).

The reconstruction process taking place in an artist's visionary mind could render obsolete artefacts such as faith in oracles (e.g. the I Ching, see supra). Commenting on the arbitrary superimposition of speech and visual elements which he used extensively in his work, in comparison with the earlier Cage and Cunningham approach, stage director Robert Wilson (1993) said:

Of course, it's all chance, and sometimes I thought about its being just chance in my work, but I'm more interested, not in the collage, but in a construction, and how things are architecturally placed together.

In other words, composers and performers have the ultimate power of 'designing' a multifaceted, poetic space-time on which the spectator's imagination will be free to make discoveries during a carefully studied journey, as proposed by Ferdinando Taviani (1991:256). In his cognitive account of imagination processes, Taviani went very close to Abhinavagupta.

Deconstruction of time in the contemporary performing arts appears similar to restatements of space by abstract painting. Instead of securing the artist with fixed aesthetic canons, it provokes a feeling of deep dissatisfaction which may later give rise to creative accomplishment and a particular type of enthusiasm (shauq). Presumably, Francis Bacon was in such a disposition when he aimlessly (and successfully) threw a sponge at the painting he had been working on for a long time.

If there is still something diabolical, and altogether damnable in our times, it is to linger artistically over forms, instead of being like those burnt at the stake, who gesture from their pyres. (Artaud 1964:20)

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