The future will be confusing
Thursday 21 of April
Let’s start with the distinction between future, and what is to come. Starting with the first term, we can say that the future is the organized structure of the advent – that is to say, of an expected, or anticipated, coming or arrival. The dictionaries tell us about the type of futurity characteristic of the advent – it is a futurity predicated upon that which has already been announced, planned, expected. In this sense, the future becomes synonym of economy: a structuring that forces time to take (a proper) place and thus to become predictable, reproducible, and locatable. In this temporal economy of the advent, the future not only arrives. It must arrive – moreover, it must arrive as expected. Note the imperative mode attached to this temporality.
André Lepecki (Brazil, 1965) is Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is also a curator, writer and dramaturg. Author of Exhausting Dance: performance and politics of movement (Routledge 2006), currently translated into 6 languages. He edited the anthologies Of the Presence of the Body (Wesleyan 2004), The Senses in Performance (with Sally Banes, Routledge 2007), and Planes of Composition: Dance Theory and the Global (with Jenn Joy, Seagull Press 2010).
