Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.