A Theological Turn? French Postmodern Dance and Herman Diephuis’s D’Après J.-C.

Abstract

Unlike other authors in this collection who have viewed French postmodern dance through the political ideas of Jacques Rancière and Guy Debord (see Bojana Cvejic (Chapter 14) and Augusto Corrieri (Chapter 16) in this volume), I intend to reflect on how it can embody and articulate the theological idea of grace as a gift given through the suffering of the flesh and the sensible intuition of life. I do this in the following stages. First, with reference to choreographic works by Jérôme Bel and Mathilde Monnier, I explore French postmodern dance in terms of the distinction that Jacques Derrida makes between a ‘theological stage’ of representation and a ‘nontheological’ theatre of unrepresentable life. Second, I contest that distinction by reading D’après J.-C. (After JC, 2004), a work by French-based choreographer Herman Diephuis, through Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of revelation. Finally, I suggest that D’après J.-C. reverberates with a much neglected Catholic tradition in French thought and theatre, and at the same time challenges French republican secularism not because of its differences from French postmodern dance, but rather because of what it has in common with the latter.