Choreographic Practices - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2021

This article outlines the theoretical and aesthetic considerations of Love’s performance-as-research method for developing interdisciplinary tap dance work – a method he identifies as Mix(tap)ing. By first narrating how he arrived to his current practice as a dancemaker and artistic researcher, Love is able to show the ways in which his method samples strategies, voices and traditions from the cultural past to imagine and work towards futuristic locations of liberation and possibility. Ultimately, Mix(tap)ing allows Love to layer intellectual concepts and theatrical conventions in order to design an approach to rhythm tap dance improvisation and choreography that is expressly Black and queer. This article is, in itself, a demonstration of Love’s method as it joins written analysis with a performed lecture script to evidence how Love has previously presented one of his Mix(tap)es.

This article discusses an artistic act: walking for seven sequential days inside a cage made of chicken wire in the grounds of a former mental hospital in Lapinlahti in Helsinki, Finland and its potential to offer insights into past events in mental hospitals through the notions of corporeal attunement and atmosphere. The idea for Walking Cage was prompted by a word in the data, which included memories by patients and non-patients of Finnish mental hospitals gathered in connection with a multidisciplinary research project. Passers-by, occasional co-walkers, weather conditions and the grounds of the former mental hospital partially formed and deformed the atmospheric qualities of the artistic research event. These qualities were experienced through corporeal attuning influenced by the Skinner Releasing Technique, a somatic movement method. The article proposes a singular way of approaching the possibilities of corporeal openness and sensibility in a choreographic process in which, illuminated by, among others, the notions of threshold and limit, one becomes a stranger to oneself by surrendering oneself to atmospheric intensities. This artistic research study adopts a phenomenological approach, drawing mainly on the ideas of Jean-Luc Nancy, Mikel Dufrenne and Emmanuel Levinas.

This article examines joint creation in contemporary performance making by analysing the collaboration between two prominent Finnish artists – costume designer Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila and choreographer Carl Knif. Using personal interviews along with performance analysis framed in relation to the Aristotelian term ‘friendship’ as components of this case study, the author draws conclusions from the process of a solo performance and its costume that foregrounds elements of friendship: sharing time, being and discourse. Viewing this relational understanding between parties as an asset, this study introduces elements of a positive approach and tools to achieve such in the making of dance performance.