Choreographic Practices - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019

This article offers a reflexive account of my journey from dance into walking art through a methodological examination of tracktivism: the rural, eco-activist, pedestrian performance practice I have developed over the past eight years. My dancer's perception of walking art in the sculptural tradition had always been as choreography on an expanded scale: bringing attention to spatial patterns in landscape through the 'stylus' of the walking body. Here I examine the ways in which the growing oeuvre of tracktivist works have employed this choreographic device to (re)frame walking art as eco-activist performance. I consider how an art walk may be shaped in such a way as to foreground the spatial nature of ecological dis/connection in working agricultural landscapes, giving examples from my practice. I also propose that as patterns or routes expressly designed to be walked, the performer's material body becomes a 'measurant' to calibrate human scale against planetary scale. Thus the practice might be perceived to function as emancipated eco-activist choreography that offers a means of revealing and embracing our ecological enmeshment with/in complex more-than-human flows.

Benjamin Vandewalle and Yoann Durant label their performance Hear (2016) as an auditory choreography. Starting from an elaboration on the etymology of choreography I research what the auditory dimension adds and changes to choreography. Choreographing based on auditory decisions inverses sound and movement. This inversion has consequences from the process to the end result. Based on the sonic quality as main decision principle I unravel the creation process of Hear in seven main action: to stand, to walk, to breathe, to look, to move, to disappear and to sound. This division reveals how the actual choreographing doesn't stop at the end of the creation process. In the second half of the paper, I turn to the experience of an auditory choreography, where the body of the audience functions as a resonance box. The discomfort of a blindfold during the experience, leads to the installation of a delicate intimacy and reveals the close connection between sound, touch and movement. The precariousness of the installed intimacy triggers and enforces the audience imagination. Through my own experience of Hear I discover how the audience in an auditory choreography becomes a co-creator.

Choreographer Sara Giddens reflects upon how making a series of ambulant performance works, The Dream-Walks, invited her to dwell in space–times in-between, and how a resulting stepping aside heralded the opening up of a fundamental change in her relationship to audiences. Drawing upon a range of philosophers, including Bachelard, Heidegger and Rancière, Giddens reflects upon the impact that dwelling in those in-between space-times has had on her professional and pedagogic practice.

16 short video clips, taken from the Eight Dream-Walks can be viewed at (https://www.bodiesinflight.co.uk/events/dwelling-in-between-choreographic-practices-102/).

Kunstapotheke is a choreographic project that was based in the premises of an abandoned pharmacy and shopping district in the northern part of Hamburg, Germany. Meandering between disused pharmacy facilities and its urban surroundings, a group of performers and myself explored how urban scores render possible to journey through time. Being interested in how past narratives might craft and shape possible urban futures, we experienced that time often shatters into fragments, evoking the question: How can urban scores respond to and subvert urban narratives and their choreographies? To be able to answer this question we explored the urban surroundings with the following choreographic tools: (1) pre-selection and re-selection, (2) combination, (3) intermedial variation and (4) contextualization and re-contextualization. Working with these choreographic tools revealed that past narratives are inevitably tied to spatiotemporal frameworks, frames and framings, which are unavoidably linked to overall complexes interrelated with autobiographical, cultural, political and economic constellations. Thus, we incessantly found ourselves within spatiotemporal encounters that allowed for different types of temporalities to not only bubble beyond the surface, but effectively irrupt and disrupt one another. In the course of this, different spatial realities unfolded, preoccupying themselves exclusively with individual processes of occurrence. The project Kunstapotheke repeatedly contextualized and re-contextualized these occurrences, defining the choreographic process as a practice of simultaneous reference and transcription.

In this article, I reflect on my experience of two performance works: Still Life (2018) by Hamish Macpherson and Papier mutliforme et Papier Comestible (2018) by Emilie Gallier, both of which cultivate partial experiences for the spectator. I consider how the partial nature of these works raise questions about what it means to access a choreographic work and rely on new ways of thinking about how we experience and analyse performance.

This article reflects the process of choreographic making where the choreographer actively decentres her choreographic choices by collaborating with participating dancers and historical inspirations. It explores the creative potential of archives – a set of temple-sculptures found in eastern India called the Alasa-Kanyas (meaning indolent maidens) – as past evidence of historically marginalized bodies of the temple-dancers, also known as Maharis, in the field of the eastern Indian classical dance form called Odissi. Alasa-Kanya: Sculpture in Odissi (AK), a Practice as Research (PaR) experiment, imbricates the historical and the theoretical in choreographic practice, re-inscribing the archival traces of the Mahari as found in the sculptural traces of the Alasa-Kanyas by an inculcated deconstruction of Odissi dance vocabulary. According to philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction destabilizes the hierarchy between the centres and margins of a given area of knowledge. This experiment questions the hierarchical construction of Odissi dance as technically elevated than Mahari performance. Theoretical deconstruction is complemented by an embodied investigation via structured studio improvisations using the Creative Articulations Process (CAP). Choreographic process and analysis of AK deconstructs the technicity in Odissi movement via engaging with the Alasa-Kanyas or the sculptural archives of the Maharis in Indian temples. In this way, the once marginalized interrupts the dominant historical narratives and disrupts the patriarchal construction of a male centre, in turn questioning the agency of the choreographer in the choreographic process.