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- Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022
Choreographic Practices - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 13, Issue 2, 2022
- Editorial
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Making choreography, making community
Authors: Simon Ellis and Amaara RaheemAmaara and Simon are choreographers who co-edit Choreographic Practices (along with Dani Abulhawa and Lee Miller). In this editorial they peer into the relationship between making community and practices of choreography and how it might help us rethink the nature of authorship and authority. They talk about their best moves and also call on the work and practices of Sophie Strand, Miranda Tuffnell and D. H. Lawrence to propose that being an artist might be so much more than the first-person pronoun in ‘here’s something I made’.
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- Articles
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circling, tumbling, dancing around: Back pieces
More LessThis article consists of six text–image pieces that share practical research into modes of moving, perceiving and thinking through the back and extended notions of dorsality. Since 2019, through workshops, studio residencies, presentations and collaborative moving, conversational, drawing and writing practices, I have been developing physical exercises and choreographic devices for tuning into the back, bringing attention to and exploring the unseen surfaces and axial technologies of the back. These dorsal practices are evolving through movement and sensory research as well as opening a wider set of philosophical concepts and possibilities for orientating in and co-habiting a world amongst other bodies and things. The pieces combine short written texts, sidenotes and images. The texts have evolved from sensory observation in practical movement tasks and conversations, in the form of notes and recordings, often working in a dynamic process between embodied experience, memory and imagination. The footnotes are a playful device for allowing other peripheral ideas such as light, moth, vestibular labyrinth, tree, tracing paper, ghost, voice, front-crawling to enter and generate gaps for the reader in which to linger, skip, skim, imagine, (re)connect. The still images, diagrams and drawings are another way of taking note, testing, proposing, articulating and reading.
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Remote proximity: Making immersive dance under COVID-19 lockdown
By SanSan KwanThis article chronicles the various pivots one dance ensemble, Lenora Lee Dance, made in trying to bring our dance project to fruition under the COVID-19 pandemic and after both the murder of George Floyd and the spike in anti-Asian hate in the United States between 2020 and 2021. And the Community Will Rise was intended to be an immersive, site-specific dance set throughout the courtyards, hallways and apartment interiors of the Ping Yuen public housing complex in San Francisco’s Chinatown in autumn 2020. The piece aimed to explore the lives of the residents and the history of their struggle for affordable housing and tenants’ rights, amidst a contemporary background of rising housing insecurity among communities of colour in San Francisco. We were three rehearsals into the project when COVID-19 hit the Bay Area in March 2020. This article documents our attempts to adapt And the Community Will Rise from an immersive dance to an immersive screendance. I reflect upon the various options we moved through as the pandemic wore on, as well as the questions social distancing raised for us regarding the value of home, of sociality and also the value of remote dance performance. This article offers one case study, from an insider perspective, to understand wider artistic innovations this pandemic moment has initiated.
Together they board a boat that crosses the San Francisco Bay and pulls into Angel Island. They disembark and trek the mile to the Immigration Station. An immigration officer meets them and divides them into two groups. Names are called and individuals step forward, the rest are marched into the building in two streams. One stream goes to the women’s dormitory where earlier detainees are already settled; a man in a white medical coat enters and calls more names; these women are ushered to the medical examination room, the showers and the interrogation office. The new arrivees follow behind.
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- Artist Essay
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On the table: An open invitation
Authors: Caitlin Dear and Ebony MullerIn this text, we propose the table as a choreographic and discursive tool that enables fruitful, collective exploration of artistic material. Through poetics, essay and scores, we share our project On the Table (OTT) – a format for artistic exchange and collaboration. We, Caitlin and Ebony, co-developed the OTT format in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia), where it runs as a programme of regular sessions out of Dancehouse. Each is hosted by a different artist who puts something ‘on the table’ for everyone who attends to explore together. This can be any manner of provocation, meaning sessions take disparate forms, ranging from workshops and in-progress showings to open artistic explorations and collaborative research. Hosts come from various forms of dance, approaches to bodily practice and relationships to movement. We platform artists who work with dance in combination with other fields, which have included those working within martial arts, game design, science and therapy. People from these fields or with thematic interests in a session are encouraged to attend regardless of movement experience. Our practice enables everyone in the room to contribute towards and shape the session’s explorations. The aim is for an unconventional array of people to work synergistically, from their varied points of interest and differing levels of expertise. Although the format is applicable beyond a dance or choreographic context, it centres around collective, embodied encounters. In this text, we extend an open invitation to readers to borrow from our practice or initiate their own satellite OTT events.
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- Position Paper
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Differing bodyminds: Cripping choreography
Authors: Leni Van Goidsenhoven, Jonas Rutgeerts and Carrie SandahlIn this position paper we start to articulate what crip theory can open up for choreography and dance. Crip theory is a critical perspective that analyses, exposes and critiques systems of normalcy in representation and social practices as well as a framework for imagining alternatives based on disabled ways of being in the world. The term crip, short-hand for the derogatory term ‘cripple’, is a re-appropriation by disabled individuals and communities, an act of pride, a demand for inclusion in mainstream life, and, paradoxically, a defiant occupation of the margins. ‘Crip theory and choreography’ was also the topic of a symposium and doctoral school we organized in Belgium in the spring of 2022. The aim of that event was to adopt the contemporary performing arts as a realm for our theorizing in embodied and experiential forms of knowledge-making in research and art practice. Over the course of the symposium and doctoral school, we explored how ‘crip dance’ might produce difference not as a divergence from the norm, but rather as a constant process of differing that opens up multiple ways of relating to body, mind and movement. Inspired by our explorations and encounters during the event, we are guest editing a Special Issue of Choreographic Practices. What we would like to contribute to conversations already happening in this journal is extended exploration of how disability studies and its unruly offspring, crip theory, not only critique the ableist structures that define mainstream dance, but offer alternative possibilities created by non-normative bodyminds.
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- Interview
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Fading out the human presence: A conversation between Barbara Stimoli, Titta Raccagni and Simon Ellis
By Simon EllisThis is a conversation between Italian artists Barbara Stimoli and Titta Raccagni with Choreographic Practices’ co-editor Simon Ellis. The discussion begins with how Barbara and Titta began working together, and then focuses on the development and various iterations of their work Pleasure Rocks.
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- Conference Review
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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