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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020
Choreographic Practices - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Letters to Sheila: Improvisational scores in creative practice research
By Cleo MeesThis article argues that improvisational scores can function as valuable scaffolds to support creative practice research. Drawing on existing literatures about creative practice research, and the practices and scores of artists, including Simone Forti, Rosalind Crisp, James Hazel and Nancy Stark Smith, the article proposes seven different ways in which improvisational scores might help to focus, sustain and evolve research methods. Importantly, the author not only discusses the ways improvisational scores support research; she also uses a score to write the article itself, thus enacting the method she describes. The score she uses is based around a task – to write a series of letters to non-fiction author Sheila Heti. The resulting letters focus especially on the ways scores are used in improvised dance, and on the ways they might be applied in other fields such as writing and filmmaking. In doing so, the letters show how creative methodologies can be moved across disciplines and artistic forms to invigorate practice. They also give expression to and seek to better understand the embodied and affective dimensions of scholarship.
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Aristotle and Husserl go dancing: Solo improvised dance-making and the noetic cycle
By Andrew WassThis article asserts that the practice of dance improvisation is the embodiment of the noetic cycle, the cyclical relationship of two theories of noesis, Aristotle’s and Husserl’s. Aristotle describes noesis as the thinking and planning of work to be done. Husserl’s noesis describes the reception of sensuous information and the translation of that information into actionable data. Using videos of my solo release-based improvised dancing in the studio, I discuss how each theory of noesis is present in practice. These theories of noesis, when seen as complementary to one another, reveal improvised dance making as arising from the interrelationship of awareness and action. The noetic cycle provides dance makers with more theoretical lenses for researching dance and shows that dance is a testing ground and the means for philosophical inquiry.
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edged: Exploring the porous boundaries between teaching philosophy, dance performance and choreographic practice
More LessOver the past four years I have developed The Porous Body, a teaching philosophy that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability in dance training by following four fundamental guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor and paradox. As my process deepened, I wondered: what would happen if I applied The Porous Body to my choreographic practice? How might this framework prove fruitful during a creative process? What kind of choreographic work would emerge from this experiment? This article is an artist’s reflection on an artistic experiment; it describes the first choreographic process to which I applied The Porous Body’s guiding principles, and which led to the creation and performance of edged, a solo work exploring the porous edges between inner/outer, planned/unplanned, control/surrender, pleasure/struggle and terror/courage.
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Choreographic practice research and emotional labour through the x-ray of affective dissonance
More LessIn this writing I offer critical illuminations and diffractions with(in) researching, producing and performing a piece of choreographic practice research titled (in)fertile territories: a performance lecture. I utilize the concept of affective dissonance as x-ray to get closer to feelings and emotional labour as an early-career researcher in an institutional context. The writing is grounded in the cultural politics of emotion, and presents choreographic practice research, feminist critical reflection, and writing as technologies mobilized in the hopes of birthing something anew with significantly personal choreographic material.
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Somatic ethnographic research: Achoreographic process informed byAlexander Technique
More LessI write from the perspective of a dance artist interested in reflecting on and sharing my experiences of applying the Alexander Technique (AT) to a choreographic process. The inquiry was framed by dance ethnography, and I choreographed, danced, interviewed and performed with emerging to established dance artists specializing in Contact Improvisation, and interviewed and participated in lessons and workshops with AT teachers. During each phase of the research, I asked: why and how does AT guide me to embody my practice as a choreographer and dancer? This self-ethnographic research outlines an AT-inspired dance methodology using a systematic somatic process to enhance physical, mental and emotional coordination for choreographers and dancers. I propose that AT expanded my attention moment-to-moment to develop my choreographic intentions and desires.
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Performing Water: Site-specific dance-making as liquid art
More LessThe Remnant Dance Project, Culaccini, developed site-specific dance movement in response to the waters of the Taleggio Valley, Italy, during the Nature, Art and Habitat Residency (NAHR) (2018). The intention was to respond to the Enna River system through documenting dance movement made in the region via film, photography and reflective writing. The practice-led research process was shared on the daily blog, ‘The drop of the day’. At the close of the NAHR, a short dance film, Performing Water, was made to further interrogate the nature of site-specific dance-making in water and the notion of what constitutes ‘site-dance’ in this context. In our journey of water-dance discovery, unique marks have remained on each other, the site and on things we have made, like the traces of a water vessel: culaccini. The dance made for the project was immersive and focused, constructed to invite interpretation through the use of symbolism and imagery.
Progetto Culaccini sviluppa un movimento di danza site-specific in risposta alle acque dei torrenti della Val Taleggio, Italia (2018). L’intenzione è quella di rispondere al sistema del torrente Enna documentando il movimento di danza fatto sul luogo attraverso film, fotografia e scrittura riflessiva. Questo processo di ricerca guidato dalla pratica venne condiviso quotidianamente sul blog: La goccia del giorno. Al termine della residenza Natura, Arte e Habitat, la produzione di un cortometraggio di danza ha permesso l’analisi e approfondimento della danza site-specific in acqua e la nozione di ciò che costituisce la ‘danza’ in questo contesto. Nel nostro viaggio di scoperta della danza nell’acqua, segni unici rimangono impressi uno sull’altro, il luogo e le cose che abbiamo fatto, come le tracce di un vessello d’acqua: i culaccini. La danza fatta in questo contesto è stata immersiva e focalizzata; costruita per invitare l’interpretazione attraverso l’uso di simbolismo e immagini.
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Subtle, intimate performance in urban space: Ongoing research and notes from Close Distance
Authors: Jen Urso and Eileen StandleyThis article reflects on an evolving research project entitled Close Distance that takes shape at the intersection of dance and drawing. Close Distance is a durational performance that uses movement and the technique of blind gesture drawings (images created without looking down at the drawing) in public spaces to identify the subtlety, dignity, respect and sensitivity of human beings. With this article, we wish to share our process, lines of inquiry and some of the discoveries resulting from our evolving research practice together. Our continuous exploration through the body and drawing in choreographic relation to public sites, everyday activities and human connection in unconventional spaces introduces the marriage of artistic process between a choreographer/dancer and a visual artist/drawer who think very similarly but use different tools. Our work illuminates the richness of unexpected collaborations performing across media and disciplines in social spaces, as well as a non-invasive approach to social engagement.
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Nomadic Making: Enacting difference through collaborative performance practice
More LessThis article considers how scored, collaborative performance practice enacts Braidotti’s Nomadic subject and disrupts advanced capitalism’s suture of object and subject formation (Lepecki), thereby offering a means for posthumans to ‘become imperceptible’ (Braidotti after Deleuze). Collaborative performance practice, I argue offers a lived experience of the non-unitary subject and political potential of pure difference. I suggest also that ‘spectator studies’ (Melrose) reconsiders its focus on object over process by arguing that choreographic knowledge resides not in the event or the performance score but the processes of assemblage and in-between relations of people and practices (Manning).
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Building Fields of Play: An examination of the use of notational analysis to reinterpret dynamic and sequential movement from Rugby Union to inform the creation of a new dance work
Authors: Grant McLay, Lee McGowan, Gene Moyle and Laurent FrossardThis article offers an examination of a research process that used elements taken from an elite sporting competition, in this case an international Rugby Union match, to develop choreographic thinking tools to create a new contemporary dance work. One goal of this practice-led research was to create a vehicle for penetrating the physicality and unpacking the bodily configurations created in a rugby match. Data derived from a frame-by-frame analysis of a recorded match allowed for the identification and deconstruction of sequential movement to be converted into set representational, abstract choreographic tools named movement signatures and blocks. Through this research, the main physical traits identified were entanglement, directional changeability and interlocking struggle. Subsequently, these choreographic stimuli were used in the formation of movement scores and an abstract movement vocabulary to inform the creation and performance of a non-traditional research output, Fields of Play (2015). Furthermore, this practice-led study utilized elements of Laban Movement Analysis and sports movement analysis to develop an experimental approach to movement annotation and the development of a choreographic process. Through witnessing this hybrid movement vocabulary evolve, the research revealed qualities of de-centred logic, interruption of flow and the potential for a game dramaturgy to emerge.
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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