Yes and No to Overflow

In Attali’s analysis, music and noise produce contrasting states of altered ideology in which the former functions as a tool of power, generating collective belief in harmonic order and protective agency while simultaneously causing us to forget the possibility of a carnivalesque freedom. By virtue of composition’s “cleanliness,” music produces a pacifying sonic spectacle in which the promise of order causes a turn away from the potential release offered by the real, noisy world. Composers, filmmakers and choreographers, however, have interrogated the immersive qualities of both music and image by crafting works, with vehement postmodern rejection of the absorption provoked by harmonious structure giving way to later experimentation at both ends of the music/noise spectrum. Within choreographies by Karole Armitage, Wim Vandekeybus, William Forsythe and others, scenes of chaotic and competing pluralities of sound and movement tax visual and aural perception, filling the senses with relentless overwhelm whose danced-dramaturgical impetus is rendered unclear by the interference of the whole. The interruptive injections of sensory overflow considered in this paper invert Attali’s schema in which music’s sacrificial function provides a comforting alternative to “killing” Dionysian noise. An exploration of the production and often acrimonoius reception of high-dynamic streams of sound and movement reveals how presentation and rupture of choreographic overflow produces a distinctly perceptual ideology of performativity.