Dancing with Georges Perec

March 17, 2025

An interview with Leslie Satin, author of Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Leslie Satin is a choreographer, dancer, writer, and teacher (Gallatin School/New York University) based in New York City. Her new book, Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo, considers the work of experimental 20th-century French writer Georges Perec from a dancer’s perspective. Leslie reflects on how she connected dance to Perec’s writing even though Perec didn’t write about dance, and why studying his work continues to have relevance across artistic disciplines.

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First, can you share a little about yourself and your dance history?

This question makes perfect sense here, more than in many written works in which the writer’s background figures. I’ll answer it “straight” first and then make it more particular to the book. I grew up in New York City and studied acting as a child and early adolescent. During that time, I saw these teenage girls who were studying dance hanging out between classes and I was excited by, and envious of, their long hair and dirty feet.

I took some dance classes here and there. Then, in college, I studied modern dance, largely Limon-inspired, which only went so far for me. And then the brilliant dancer, choreographer, and teacher James Waring came to my school, and the rest is my dance history. Jimmy, as everyone called him, made genre-defying dances before the advent in the early 1960s of the Judson Dance Theater, whose experimental lineage in what we call post-modern dance continues.

Jimmy introduced me simultaneously to that experimentation across the arts, not only in dance, and to the significance of detail in making and looking at and knowing about any art object or action. He made sure that when I returned to New York City after graduation, I would study with Merce Cunningham, which I did. I continue to study and practice his technique, which is central to my ideas about bodies, dance, space, and time. I also study and work in other elements of dance, including forms based on somatic practices and improvisation, and I periodically study West African dance. I teach and write about some of these; and that experimental lineage I referred to is what I consider my dance home.

About the particular importance of my dance history: The book is primarily about Perec’s work and its relationship to other forms. It is also about his life (1936-1982). That said, it is written as a kind of autobiography, mine, a performative autobiography, bringing my life and his into an imagined conversation, an imagined relationship. Autobiography serves as both a way of seeing his work and mine and as a structure for the writing.

How did you get interested in Georges Perec? What was your introduction to his work?

I started reading Perec in 2012. I first read his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, which contains a short book, Species of Spaces, and multiple examples of his published work. In Species of Spaces, Perec systematically in some ways and quite freely in others considers all the spaces of his life from smallest to largest, from the letters on a page to the streets, towns, and countries in which he lives to the solar system beyond everyday perceptual experience. The book is composed using a wide range of writerly approaches, such as lists and literary games. Along with some of the “other pieces” in the title, the writing touches on memories and questions figuring hugely in his life and writing. These include his Jewishness, not his religion per se (he wasn’t religious) but his dark history in wartime and post-war France, especially his terrible losses; both his parents were killed in the Holocaust when he was a small child: his father in battle, his mother in Auschwitz.

I next read Perec’s lengthy, wildly complex, often funny, and research- and attention-demanding novel, Life A User’s Manual. Perec goes all the way into his own game, writing an expansive account of intersecting times, spaces, characters, and narratives linked to a single day, to a Paris apartment building’s hundred rooms.

Perec was a member of Oulipo, which stands for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature. It was comprised primarily of writers as well as other artists and mathematicians, some of whom had been resistance fighters during the war. They devised constraints to what they could do in writing a piece. To me, this is a significant parallel to what dancers and choreographers were doing in the 1960s, at Judson in particular. Rather than making dances driven by feelings or by familiar structures, choreographers created new forms of composition. Similarly, Oulipo members created what they called “constraints.” An example: Perec wrote the detective novel La Disparition, (English title: A Void), without using the letter “e.” I love games and puzzles, and I’ve been working with scores since I learned the word in undergraduate school. Perec’s work spoke to me.

How did you link Perec’s writing to dance?

I don’t know how I came to that connection initially, but I felt it right away after completing Species of Spaces and Other Pieces and Life A User’s Manual. And after an unexpected encounter with another Perec enthusiast in Chichester, England, who has become a dear friend and colleague, I jumped into a study of Perec’s work which extends into the present. I continue to engage with his ideas and practices as they loop through my own. In the book, I introduce what I’m doing as a dancerly response to his work.

One of the ways I look at his work and dance, or even his work as dance, has to do with the four categories of his work as he articulated them. These are: Autobiographical—work addressing actual and alternate retellings, individual and collective; Ludic—work focusing on structural scores and games, often evolved from things he heard about or spoke about in Oulipo; Sociological—work focusing on the everyday and the ordinary; and Novelistic—involving stories and “meant to be read quickly,” the least significant in terms of experimental dance.

I look in the book at the significance of the body and embodied knowledge and experience, clearly central to dance, as important to Perec’s writing. I consider the creation and demonstration of the body as archive in Perec’s work and in dance.

Perec paid a great amount of attention to the body, but not in a way that a traditional writer of fiction would do. He wouldn’t simply describe, as in “Mary came into the room. She was thin and wore a blue hat.” Instead, in one novel, the narrator – who is speaking in second person (and it’s unclear whether he’s speaking to himself or the reader) – is both minutely described and reduced to a single eye. It’s fascinating and very disturbing.

What was your process writing Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo?

Before I wrote this book, I had three substantial articles about Perec and dance published, and I had presented numerous conference papers on his work. I had made dances in which elements of his work contributed significantly to the process. Because I wrote this book with the relative security of having a publisher and a contract, I had to lay out in advance the plan for my chapters; this led to a more systematic process, which was both a challenge and a support. Beyond that, I read everything I could applying directly and indirectly to the subject; I spoke with other people about my work; I showed people chapters in process and discussed them; I edited and changed and developed, etc.

I found everything about Perec fascinating. I had to keep from simply writing about everything. The chapter on his early life, entitled Radical Fractures, is largely looking at his childhood in occupied Paris, and the unspeakable loss of both his parents. Luckily, he had an aunt and uncle and cousins who adopted him. A big part of who he was, and what permeates his work, though not always directly, is his loss.

Autobiography is an important element of the book’s perspective and structure. I realized somewhere in the process, that I had somehow linked Perec to my father. They were born about 10 years apart. My father lived to a ripe old age, while Perec died at age 45 of lung cancer. I kept thinking about what their lives shared, especially about being Jewish and living through the war.

I divide autobiography into the categories implicit and explicit. Explicit might be, “I live on X Street and went to X University and have X children.” Those are things you could check out and find. I think about autobiography in dance as implicit: How does a person move or arrange other dancers in space? What do you learn about who a person is and what that person’s individual and sociocultural circumstances are from a dance that has no narrative or language component?

You recently presented a piece from the dance scores you created based on Perec’s work. Can you share more?

I made a dance based on scores that I’d used to make earlier dances, seeing how I, and the dance, would be affected by my long engagement with Perec. I don’t make work emerging from emotion or acting or music. I’m interested in what can happen with human beings in this space in this moment. I’m interested in the formalist elements, but that’s not all there is. Our bodies are expressive.

For example, one long section of this most recent dance was a duet for me and a man. We’re about the same size. The segment is completely in unison and in two parallel lines. It’s a sequence of two movement scores repeated, and every time the “A” phrase is done, it loses what was at the beginning and adds something new at the end. Every time, the “B” phrase is done, it keeps its beginning and end but adds something in the middle. We’re in a constant state of having to know exactly where we are in the sequence(s) while we also need to stay attuned to each other. That tension, that kind of embodied thinking, interests me.

I did a piece some years ago in which my husband, a musician, performed. In one segment, he and I rolled over each other very slowly, as a unit, from downstage to upstage. While that was happening, there was a video on the upstage wall scrolling down as we were rolling upstage, so eventually the bodies and video met. I didn’t want to revive that material in the new dance; it seemed too sexual in the current context. Instead, a man and a woman — lying prone on the floor, their heads fairly close, their feet stretching away — rolled upstage, their hands reaching out toward the basketball they held between them.

In another part, two men of different heights stood quite close to each other, not touching, very slowly walking in a small circle. One arched his back or tilted to one side and the other leaned over. They had to keep the same distance — a few inches — between their chests as they repeated and revolved, all the while looking into the other’s eyes.

Why is Georges Perec and his work still relevant, both generally speaking and in a dance context?

There is still great interest in his work and in the work of Oulipo in the literary world. In my experience, he’s much better known in France, elsewhere in Europe, and the UK than in the US. For those of us who care or will come to care about the arts, about human lives, and our embodied experiences, and who are distressed by the current circumstances of antagonism toward people’s freedoms, Perec’s writing reminds us to really look, to really see, to pay attention to the details of our lives… what he called the “endotic.” Dance always offers that possibility, too — and creating enriched partnerships across the arts can only be a valuable choice.

This word, “endotic,” which Perec made up, was meant to be the opposite of exotic. There’s a whole chapter in Species of Spaces about going into the street and noticing the many things you’ve never noticed even though you’ve walked on the street many times. This sense of paying attention is central to thinking about Perec’s work, about dance, and more.

What do you hope readers take away?

I hope that readers who are new to Perec are delighted to find him and his work. I hope that readers who see joining dance and literature only in terms of illustration or translation, such as in story dances, open up to other relationships to language. I hope that readers, especially of French literature and Perec himself, and of Oulipo, will find room in their lives for dance. I hope that readers who are interested in dance alone will be drawn to its relationships to the worlds and the art worlds beyond it, sharing time and place. I hope that readers are drawn to the importance of embodied experience and embodied knowledge as a way of knowing ourselves and the worlds in which we live.

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To learn more about Leslie’s work, visit lesliesatin.com. Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo is available for order through Routledge or the usual online options. Leslie kindly asks if you’re interested in supporting Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo to request it from your university or local library.