Choreographic Practices - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2021

In this conversation, dance-artist Amaara Raheem talks about her choreographic thinking and practice with CHOR co-editor Simon Ellis. They discuss Raheem’s interest in dancing, ritual and research ‘in-residence’, and wonder about the kinds of bodies that dance. They consider how artists intentionally create the conditions for their work and practices to happen. The conversation is in part designed to introduce Raheem as a new co-editor to CHOR’s readership.

Reflecting on a specific case study commissioned for the 2020 Keir Choreographic Awards in Australia, this text investigates how the work De-Limit sought to negotiate the relationship between menial, process-driven labour and dance/installation art. Developed as a collaboration between dance maker Alison Currie and visual artist David Cross, the work interrogated how Walter Benjamin’s and Martin Heidegger’s ideas on boredom and suspended time, respectively, might offer new considerations of task-based practice. This study specifically seeks to test key thresholds in relation to task-orientated discourse with the insertion of a series of counter-moments informed by Freud’s thinking around the uncanny. Playing with ideas of staging and set making at the intersection of art and dance, this text also seeks to interrogate how the building of an art installation offers a frame in which to understand dance and its assorted modalities in different ways. De-Limit slips between functional and abstract, exploring live action as an unstable liminal space between labour and performance.

This is the record of a conversation held on the morning after Dani Abulhawa premiered her new piece Concord. At her kitchen table she sat down with Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley, who has worked as dramaturg on the piece, and together they reflect upon the generation of the work, and also the experience of encountering the work with an audience. Questions of collaboration and voices emerge over morning coffee.

The article is a document of artistic research insofar as it invents forms of thinking-in-writing-with-breathing. In addition to that, the article gives insights on breathing’s potential for expanded choreographic practice by drawing on Allan Kaprow’s ‘performance of living’. Choreography turns then into a means to stage everyday actions, such as breathing, in indeterminate frames. Equally important is the somatic bodywork of Ilse Middendorf and its interconnections with other forms of bodywork that emerged at the turn of the last century. Bringing in somatic bodywork reflects the bodily practice-based nature of the ponderings. It is a fertile ground for speculating on the relevance of attention and stillness for choreography through physical rest enlivened by breathing.

An evening in early November 2021, Lee met with Alesandra and Jonathan to discuss a series of workshops undertaken at École des Sables, Senegal. What emerged from this conversation was a discussion of the need to interrogate how things are done in an attempt to effect change.