Choreographic Practices - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020

One of the alluring aspects of choreography is the obscurity of its strategies and its propensity to evoke speculative movement-thinking. As artistic research that is intuitively and critically developed from my physical location in Aotearoa New Zealand, astrochoreography evolves its aesthetics, theories and strategies in close observation of a Southern Hemispheric night sky. Drawing materials from deep space, the choreographic body becomes more than human in its genealogies of practice and live performance. This essay proposes an entanglement between the astral and artistic, cosmic and choreographic, engaging speculative theories of darkness, performance writing and global astrophysics.

This article discusses an experiment in combining personal archival digital images, including those taken at various dance performances or rehearsals, in which the phenomenon of interruption was both discovered and investigated. The composite images were shown at a Space, Race, Bodies cultural studies and activist conference with the theme of ‘Walls’, held in 2018 in Aotearoa New Zealand. Parallel with discussing the process of creating these images and considering their effects, the article draws on the experience of exhibiting at the conference to explore relations between poetics and politics. The idea of interruption can be a key to this relation. With its rich history in the modernist performing arts and film, interruption facilitates making connections through difference.

This article considers the potential of participatory artistic practice that debates borders through dance. It also asks why so many dance artists choose this form to debate borders, and what practices are typical of participatory dance investigations of borders. I discuss the range of border debates in works investigating dance and borders, and I begin to consider how privilege is dealt with by the work. I examine how dance works with participation and, alongside, look at the choreographic embodied invitation concerned. Particularly, I examine these questions through the dance work Rope Piece and consider how this dance practice as research generates a collective and participatory process in relation to borders and privilege.