Death Drive

Directed by Kira Alker

Performed by 1. Elke Luyten; 2. Kira Alker

Performed at: The Kitchen, New York City, NY, P-Bodies Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance, Leipzig, Germany and NOTAFE: Noore Tantsu Festival, Viljandi, Estonia

2013

Death Drive is a performative event that investigates how repetition and compulsion lay a pathway to the inorganic. A solo performer hangs a horizontal line across a dark stage; she steps in front of this line and dances for 3 minutes in silence. The performance is over; she strikes the line and leaves.

Death Drive has seen already many versions through different media. It was first created as a part of the Dance and Process series at the Kitchen in New York City, curated by Sarah Michelson, where it was performed in June 2013. This evening was included in Timeout New York’s list of the Best Dance of 2013. This performance was a work-in-progress showing of the choreography with preliminary experimentation in staging. The concept of Death Drive was further developed within David Bowie’s short film Blackstar in 2015. Luyten and Alker created the choreography for Blackstar expanding upon Death Drive’s choreography; Luyten also performs throughout Blackstar. The movement from Death Drive has a strong visceral relationship to aggression towards the self and death; similarly the video hunts and finally succumbs to death in its study of ritual. The marginalization of death within artistic endeavors was celebrated within Blackstar, especially as a theatricalized death ritual at the end of David Bowie’s life.

Death Drive was developed first choreographically, through a bodily relationship to the wholesome rhythm of traditional rock-and-roll. To the beat of God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, the performer rocks back and forth on the vertical axis, keeping the body compact and erect. The movement grows in size over time, keeping the same strict relationship to the beat. The oscillation enacts a great violence on the body and unable to contain the energy, the performer stops and the event is over.

Motivation became a key focal point of training of this choreography; while the action is extremely difficult and painful, I found myself wanting to do it, distinctly desiring the embodiment of the impossibility of the task. We therefore began to see this action more and more as a compulsion which led us to the consideration of mental illness as a motivator for movement. We conducted research into such phenomena and discovered a relatively unpopular and controversial concept from Sigmund Freud called “death drive”. Whereas normally humans engage in life-enriching actions and thoughts (such as socialization, nourishment, procreation etc.), the concept of death drive describes the propensity toward self-destruction.

As choreographers, we developed the piece as a self-destructive, desire-driven action, concentrating on reaching an inanimate (or “death”) state within our bodies. We came to understand that the movement must become a project and a quest and thus we resisted theatricalization and adornment with additional dance vocabulary. The task of the choreography is short and precise and brought us to consider if such an event could constitute a full-length “dance” or a “performance”. We wanted that the vehicle for the presentation of the dance to create a singular viewing of the performer’s quest towards inanimation, fighting the expectation of the audience for some type of contextualization, development or temporal shift in which to register/dismiss this type of movement.

As a work of art, Death Drive is a force towards destruction within a performer’s body as well as within our social structure of engaging with live performance (audience as an organic bodily structure). The event is staged as an evening-length dance piece, however, the performance is only 7 minutes long: the stage is set for 4 minutes and a 3-minute dance follows. The performance must also be seen within the larger social context of seeing dance performances; just as the choreography is a quest towards the inorganic, the event itself drives at resisting the social expectations of performance and then dies at its own origin.