The morning started off with a series of movement exercises. We started off with simple movements, stretching our limbs and bouncing on our knees. Yet, the movements got much complex toward the end – from crossing our hands and lifting them without raising our shoulders to following our partner’s lead and walking around the room with our eyes closed. Throughout the increasing complexity of movements, one thing remained unchanged: relaxation. Ondrej constantly told us to release tension from our body, expand ourselves in all dimension, and not fix our parts in any circumstances. This repetition of relaxing starkly contrasted to our last exercise – following our partners around the room exercise – when the velocity of the leader was subject to great change and thus its subtlety interfered with our release of tension. The repetition emphasized the subtle change.

Trajal’s choreography workshop was also a repetitive endeavor. He first started with a simple concept of accumulation in dance: a repetition of movement with an addition of new elements after each cycle. The class progressed and, with every step, Trajal added a new component to the class, be it the history of his dance, heavy theory behind contemporariness, or the actual dance. Yet, the class did not move toward a single direction, rather to a broader scope of what Trajal tried to convey through the class. As Trajal moved forward, he would spend equal amount of time reviewing, and essentially repeating, what he has just done. The repetition of information and practice helped us better understand. However, because his repetition was not mere restatement of the previous but an echo of content, each step added new perspectives to the previous. His comments after each round of dance practice helped us to develop the dance and every new piece of history guided us toward thinking about the dance in another way. The repetition added new dimension to what is being repeated.

The lecture seminar helped me conceptualize and put into words the role of repetition in the two previous classes. During class, we talked about the difference between juxtaposition and transcoding. To my shallow understanding, their difference lied in their ability to change in response to their audience: juxtaposition is mere presentation without subjectivity of change while transcoding holds agency in its ability to change. Also, since gender coding was the example used in class, transcoding seemed to play an important role in breaking down stereotypes across gender, a performative social construct established upon repeated social behavior. Drawing from the above statement, I could conclude that transcoding is innately a disruption of social repletion – and it turns out that in choreography as well. Repetition is often broken in dances to convey larger social messages.