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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Choreographic Practices - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
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Site dance as activist methodology: Creating performance/protest in sites of assembly
More LessTo date, there has been minimal discussion of site dance’s ability to foster discourse addressing large-scale geo-and sociopolitical issues in public and civic spaces. In this article, I examine a certain site-adaptive project, Rooms (2015–16), to consider how site dance practice may further public discourse around pressing issues, via the careful honing of methodological process. Here, I argue that to realize the aims of advancing political discourse, site dance methodologies must work to: empower participants through constructive mechanisms/processes; foster inclusion of diverse publics in both creation and presentation stages of a work; and locate such projects in accessible public civic spaces historically associated with assembly. By endeavouring to methodologically craft site dance practice for spaces that are intended for public assembly and discourse, we may realize the goal of creating a diverse, empowered and engaged public that will address the critical systemic concerns of our time, including neo-liberalism, globalization and climate change.
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Walking as site dance: Choreography and conflict in Tel Aviv
By Leslie SatinThis article emerges from my experiences of ‘moving and being moved’ on a recent trip to Tel Aviv. The focus is on an exploratory practice as research project, grounded in two conflicted sites – my body and Israel/Tel Aviv – and framed as compositional score, choreography and site dance. The project, based on a walking/lived experience score, aimed to explore a site and its sense of urban flow through embodied experience. This involved conscious walking, being open to sensory and affective elements and to the material phenomena within which the score was situated. This awareness included the city’s representations of itself and its historical narratives through architecture and urban design. The project integrated walking with my daily Gaga dance classes, thus joining two distinct ways of moving as they connected with my experiences of place and my participant-observer status. This article is informed by my dance research-in-motion – my encounters with the dynamic environments of everyday life – and by readings in human geography, spatial/affect theory, phenomenology, urban/architectural history, walking and social choreography, and the adventurous anthropology of Kathleen Stewart. The format of this article combines autobiography with choreographic experience broadly conceived as a practice that entwines the personal within physical, mobile experiences of space and place.
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Embodied Map (EM): Tools for urban mapping and choreography practices
More LessEmbodied Map (EM) is a method that uses the body as a cartographic and choreographic tool to map events happening in urban settings, in their geometrical and temporal extensions. This method allows artists, performers, designers, researchers and anyone with an interest in field-work practices, to transform the experiences of observation and embodiment in the urban space into a choreographic score. This experimental cartography is intended as an artistic practice using maps not as mere two-dimensional and objective reproductions, but as something creative where the body becomes the tool with which to experiment with new ways to represent space. EM Tools enable artists, educators and researchers to create their own works, using tools that integrate theoretical research and allow investigations of the relationships between urban mapping and performance practices in a systematic way. EM also may be adapted as a teaching method for use in workshops with adults and children.
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MESH: The Ensemble City – Public rituals of togetherness
More LessThis artist contribution article gives an insight into some of the somatic, choreographic and theoretical enquiry that underpins MESH project, through a combination of journal entries and reflective writing. MESH is an open-ended research and a participatory choreographic work for public spaces. It is a response to our divisive global political climate and it is concerned with the ecology of relational experiences and the somatic preconditions of our social relations. The group choreographic investigation invites people to join in the making of rituals of togetherness in different public urban spaces. A group of dancers and local residents weave through streets, indoor and outdoor public spaces, creating cooperative and self-organizing formations responding to sites and passers-by. These urban gatherings ask how a participatory choreography for a large group can bring people together to offer an experience of interdependence and cooperation through a shared physical experience. It explores the choreographic-social potential of a collaborative, responsive and self-organizing open group, whilst reimagining new forms of public collective presence.
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The politics of participatory choreographic practice in urban public space
By Beth CassaniMESH is an improvised participatory dance practice developed by dance artist Vanessa Grasse in 2017 and performed in urban public spaces. This article brings together discourses from site performance and contemporary participatory performance practices to examine site adaptivity, mobility and dialogue. I distinguish between site-adaptive practices in urban settings which simply meet the demands of the neo-liberal environment, and those which engage with site in a way that necessitates discursive and ethical modes of criticality. I suggest that trends born out of the social and ethical turns in contemporary performance can be seen to be informing strategies for relational choreographic practices in urban public space. I explore how Mesh illustrates this by analysing the methods and strategies used by Grasse and the dancers to disrupt social norms and to foster social interaction.
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Vertical dance: A tool for producing new social spaces
More LessHenri Lefebvre proposed that in order to improve our lives we need to change space. Drawing on Marxist ideas of production he developed a triadic theory of space, which he proposed could be brought together through the lived experience of the body, in particular, the dancing body (1974:205). In response, I present a vertical dance manifesto that invites us to look up and imagine dancing on the walls above us and to realize this ambition by talking to people and persuading them that occupying vertical spaces might change how we experience and perceive the urban landscape. I draw upon fifteen years of practicing vertical dance (a hybrid dance form that brings together dance and the equipment of rock climbing), extended research into site-specific practices, my Ph.D. thesis (2017) and three works I created in Belfast between 2009 and 2011. My ideas about relationships between bodies and buildings in public spaces are underpinned by Michel de Certeau’s contention that ‘space is practiced place’ (1984: 117/118), by site-specific discourse in the arts (Kaye 2000; Kwon 2004; Lacy 1995) and recent research on site-specific dance (Hunter, 2015 and Kloetzel and Pavlik, 2009).
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Backyard activisms: Site dance, permaculture and sustainability
More LessSite dance performance offers creative opportunities for social and environmental activism. Conversely, social and environmental activism is becoming increasingly performative in seeking to evocatively engage a wide range of community members in both local and global concerns. The following pages focus on how research poetry arising in the creative process of developing performances of site dance may support activism. Drawing on interdisciplinary understandings of permaculture and sustainability and new approaches in narrative representation, the research poetry expresses backyard activism in a complementary manner to the site dance itself. The poetry synthesizes creative journal entries relating to somatic improvisation and choreography with dancers, and interviews and discussions with relevant community members. In Aotearoa New Zealand and in this wider neo-liberal era, urban residents are moving away from backyard gardening and local seasonal produce, and towards consumption of mass-produced, regulated and imported foods. In this context, community activism through performance may support local and alternative food movements and speak back to dominant, sociocultural and political power systems and norms relating to food production, consumption and sustainability.
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Vernacular mapping: Site dance and embodied urban cartographies
More LessIn this article I explore the potential of site-based dance and performance to influence and inform subjective, cartographic processes of connecting and situating oneself in urban locations. ‘Vernacular mapping’ is explored as a process by which subjective urban experiences, trajectories and associations are mapped by individuals and retained and developed as cartographic tools through which we navigate and negotiate lived environments. The concept stems from critical geography and non-representational theory and proposes a progressive, contemporary approach in which individual routes, trajectories and vectors of mobility challenge the ‘representational certitude of cartography’. From this perspective I consider how encounters with site-based dance and performance might inform vernacular mapping processes and impact subjective-site relations.
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Walking in circles: Dancing with shadows – Choreo-cartography as a strategy to explore and embody ephemeral mnemonic geographies
More LessHow might strategies of choreographic embodiment generate cartographies of a ‘shadow city’? How might the deconstruction and exploration of memory reveal that which can no longer be seen?
This article explores specific elements of a site-responsive PaR process based in Berlin from 2012 to 2015 that explored ‘reading’ and writing the experience of the city as a corporeal spatial practice. This research created a platform in which participants deconstructed the environment in which they lived in order to (re) construct a heightened sense of sensitivity to the embodied experience of being in time and space. The article articulates how this was achieved through the creation, implementation and evaluation of a dynamic series of choreographic, cartographic and visual practice workshops in which I collaborated with elderly members of the city and young dancers in professional training. Through a combination of reflexive writing and the presentation of project materials (including reflection upon the materials which this study generated in the form of poetic reflection, choreographic scores, interview footage hand drawn maps and images) the article reflects upon the landscape of the city as an active archive for memory of unmarked and marked ground. It scrutinizes samples and performance traces of my socio-ethno choreographic field research. It frames the narratives, memories and improvisations gathered through this research, and explores how a sustained artistic process of dialogue and interpretation augments a specific form of cultural knowledge by generating a systematic vision and perspective of the city as a form of embodied memory and knowledge.
The body in the city acts a vessel to carry, contain and interact, forming routes and navigations through the immediacies of its encounter ...
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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