Choreographic Practices - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2011

Framing and locating the aims and scope of Choreographic Practices and The Choreographic Lab this article provides readers with an overview of recent debates around dance practices as modes of research. The lineage and discourses of practice as research are briefly introduced, with a particular focus upon notions of embodied knowing and the processes of speaking from rather than about movement. Such issues are identified and developed through references to the articles that appear in this first issue of this journal.

This article is concerned with a British choreographer's decision to write about her choreographic process, which led into projects of writing as a mode of making alongside choreographic processes. Dual in voice and perspective, the article is written by choreographer Rosemary Lee and her collaborator on the writing projects, dancer-writer Niki Pollard. Lee is a widely respected and experienced choreographer whose work spans more than two decades. Her works include large-scale site-specific performances (e.g. Common Dance 2009), short films (e.g. Boy 1995) and installations (e.g. Remote Dancing 2004) and her collaborators have included artist/film-makers Nic Sandiland, Peter Anderson and David Hinton. Lee is a research associate at ResCen, the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts at Middlesex University. It is argued that Lee writes here as a choreographer, even if her words may also serve as illustration of an argumentmade in the interest of a university economy. The imperative of the article remains as much creative to make as it is analytic to reveal or increase understanding. The article focuses on the relationship between Lee's first anticipation of a piece in a notebook, prior to casting, and to her subsequent studio practice with performers, taking as example the making of Passage (2001). Finally, it is observed that Lee's enquiry into her process circled back into her process of making Common Dance (2009).

The workshop described in this article responds choreographically to geographer Nigel Thrift's challenge that non-representational theory is best interrogated through performative means (Thrift 2007). The workshop constitutes an experiment in interweaving theory and choreographic practice in such a way as to give full value to both. Taking the form of a series of movement activities interspersed with a spoken discussion of the theoretical concerns inherent within them; the workshop addresses concepts of topological space and cartography through movement itself. The theoretical focus of the workshop adopts the Deleuzian concepts of the diagram and affect as central conceits, and draws on the work of contemporary geographers and theorists of space such as de Certeau and Lefebvre.

The article is a performance score for She's Unfaithful, a piece that was originally performed in September, 2006 at Laban (London, UK). It was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Alison D'Amato, and the original cast was Liz Atkin, Katharin Cooper, Alison D'Amato, Marc Dodi, Struan Leslie, and Amanda Punsoda-Rodriguez. The work explores the relationship between dance and textuality, performance and obedience. It complicates the role of the choreographer as author by layering text, movement ideas, and ludic structures.

In fragments of conversation, and in excerpts from their blog, choreographers Simon Ellis and Colin Poole talk about how their first collaborative process grappled with identity, responsibility and uncertainty in performance. This article, My name is Colin, and this is Simon, written in collaboration with writer Elizabeth Boyce, draws these fragmentary texts together, but does not attempt to definitively sum up Simon and Colin's work together. Instead, it gives just a glimpse into their time in the studio itself an open-ended dialogue.

This article enacts the multiplicity of sensations and ways of thinking through movement in a particular butoh dance. Narratives of independent selves become disrupted by meditations on disability and language, translation and representation, and the unfolding of somatic consciousness.

This article explores the generation and organization of ideas through practice-led research that investigates urban walking as a form of social choreography. The formulation of the script intertwines the methodical lived inquiry of walking with the experience of documenting walking. As part of an ongoing process of slow art research the article attempts to maintain fluid dialogue between the multiple material features that together constitute the work of the walk.