« If choreography emerges in early modernity to remachine the body so it can “represent itself” as a total “being-toward-movement”, perhaps the recent exhaustion of the notion of dance as a pure display of uninterrupted movement participates of a general critique of this mode of disciplining subjectivity, of constitute being […] If modernity's “only changeless element” is, paradoxically, movement, then it could very well be that by disrupting the alliance between dance and movement, by critiquing the possibility of sustaining a mode of moving in a “flow and continuum of movement”, some recent dance may be actually proposing political and theoretical challenges to the old alliance between the simultaneous invention of choreography and modernity as a “being-toward-movement” and the political ontology of movement in modernity. In that sense, to exhaust dance is to exhaust modernity’s permanent emblem. It is to push modernity’s mode of creating a privileging a kinetic subjectivity to its critical limit. It is to exhaust modernity, to use Teresa Brennan’s powerful expression – an expression that could be read as synonymous to the title of this book. » - André Lepecki

André Lepecki is an essayist and independent curator based in New York. He is professor and director of the Performance Studies Department at New York University (NYU). He holds a doctorate degree by NYU. Lepecki has published various anthologies dedicated to dance and performance theory. He directed festivals and created projects for institutions such as HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, the Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, Sydney Biennial 2016. Lepecki has authored Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (2006, published in thirteen languages) and Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016). In the 1980s and 1990s, he was dramaturgist for choreographers Vera Mantero, João Fiadeiro, Francisco Camacho and Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods. In 2008, he was awarded the prize “Best Performance” by the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (USA Section), for directing and co-curating the authorized redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (commissioned by Haus der Kunst Munich 2006 and featured at PERFORMA 07). Since 2003, he has collaborated with performance artist Eleonora Fabião in several of her actions.