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- Volume 15, Issue 1, 2024
Choreographic Practices - Differing Bodyminds: Cripping Choreography, Jun 2024
Differing Bodyminds: Cripping Choreography, Jun 2024
- Editorial
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Differing bodyminds: Cripping choreography
Authors: Jonas Rutgeerts, Leni Van Goidsenhoven and Carrie SandahlThis Special Issue originated from the symposium and doctoral seminar Differing Bodyminds – Choreographing New Pathways, held in Leuven (Belgium) a few years ago. Rather than merely documenting the event, our goal is to extend the discussions and practices initiated there into a broader debate on how crip theory can reshape choreographic discourses and practices. As we argue, ‘cripping choreography’ is more than identifying disability dance or critiquing ableist structures; it involves developing a theoretical, phenomenological and performative lens for creating and analysing dance. This lens is rooted in historical and contemporary practices of non-compliant and anti-assimilationist disability-making, doing and knowing, which explicitly position disability as a desirable aspect of our world. Our collection, while building on previous thinking about disability dance and art, aims to reorient the focus from mere representation and inclusion to transformation and creation. It seeks to explore the creative potential of crip choreography poietics, celebrating often ignored and suppressed methods for crip world-making, while also explicitly attending to hopelessness, failure, ‘unlearning’ (Dind, 89 in this issue), ‘non-docile dysdance’ (Watson, 133 in this issue) and ‘wimping out’ (Melkumova-Reynolds, 17 in this issue). All authors in this issue, therefore, engage with this non-utopian perspective: What if we were to cultivate crip’s complexity, carefully tending to the cracks endemic to crip theory, practice, identity and community? How can we hold space for the complexity of crip world-making – its tensions, its failures, its competing priorities, its joys – as it manifests in dance-making processes and aesthetics?
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- Articles
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Making space for the wimp-subject in contact improvisation
More LessThis is an autoethnographic article that unpicks the author’s experiences of navigating the form and the social world of contact improvisation (CI) as a crip bodymind that routinely passes as normative and (very) ‘able’. Drawing on fieldnotes made across a year of practising and studying CI in London, it considers what kind of subjectivities and social relations this dance form summons, encourages and constitutes. This article proposes that the ideal subject of CI is characterized by vitality, agility, intense desire, openness to risk, an ability to attune to oneself and to others and a combination of self-reliance and willingness (and capacity) to cooperate. The article draws parallels and (dis)continuities between these features and the aspects of subjecthood fostered by late capitalist ‘risk society’ and the risk subjects it conjures. It then enquires whether this ideal subject is compatible with certain neurodivergent and other crip ways of being-in-the-world. The article proceeds to consider how, and if, space can be made in CI for what is ironically defined here as the ‘wimp’ subject: less disposed to embrace risk; not adept at quick decision-making; not thrill-seeking, and easily overwhelmed by sensory and nervous stimulation.
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Crip slutaesthetics: Erotic object choreographies and temporal fractures in burlesque
By Julia HavardDirect, communicative and largely accessible, the choreographic tools of nightlife performance often elicit dramatic reactions from spectators, whether sexy, funny, surprising, glamorous or all of the above. This article follows pleasure, joy, erotics and pain across crip slutaesthetics into the choreographies of crip nightlife, based on interviews with four burlesque artists based in the United States with diverse experiences of sickness, neurodivergence, trauma and disability. I use movement analysis alongside attention to other artistic practices foundational to burlesque such as prop and costume creation to unravel the ways that performers Sweet Lorraine, Poison Ivory, Chaos X Machina and Jaqueline Boxx integrate their divergent bodymind experiences into compelling aesthetics and justice-oriented frames. I argue that crip slutaesthetics, that is the aesthetic qualities of crip sexual performance, can offer tools towards undoing ableism as it is entangled with racism, homophobia and transphobia that are often silenced by more formal concert dance worlds in the effort to deny embodied difference as well as pleasure from the proscenium stage.
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Nether Space(s): Unveiling endometriosis experiences in performance
By Kate MarchEndometriosis is a debilitating and incurable disease impacting one in ten women (including individuals assigned female at birth). Stirred by my battle with this disease, I devoted my doctoral research to exploring lived body experiences of endo in and through an embodied, improvisational painscape practice. This discussion hones in on the later stages of research development and eventual public presentation of Nether Space(s): a performance/exhibition marrying movement, kinaesthetic painting and embodied poetry into a cohesive painscape. Although Nether Space(s) exposes the often concealed or invisible suffering related to gendered disabilities like endometriosis, the negotiations with time, space, energy and expression likely resonate with individuals who endure various kinds of menstrual, reproductive or chronic pain. In disseminating the research journey, this article demonstrates how engaging with the physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual scars of unfathomable pain experiences implicitly necessitates the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies and critical perspectives. Specifically, I pinpoint how an artistic practice shaped and birthed from endo experiences champions improvisational prowess, feminist inquiry and crip identity. The shared imagery, poetry and personal accounts of the various creative outcomes associated with Nether Space(s), further reveal that an improvisational feminist-crip performance practice can facilitate embodied agency by cripping endo pain. Notably, idiosyncratic attributes of Nether Space(s), some of which include scar symbolism; alternative spatialities, temporalities or energies; or convergences of narrative and abstract, are unpacked through the lens of netherness – an original construct that emerged as a pivotal revelation of the research journey.
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Dancing hors sujet: On butoh and autism
More LessButoh dance – an avant-garde dance ‘form’ which emerged in Japan in the early 1960s – has been discussed by various scholars in terms of the deconstruction or the unlearning of the social body. In this article, written from my perspective as an autistic butoh dancer, I offer a reflection on the relationship between the autistic body and the butoh body – or rather, I offer a reflection on the relationship between (my) autistic body and (my) butoh body, though I argue that butoh and autism precisely call into question the (neurotypical) assumptions embedded in this sentence. That is, I believe that butoh and autism call into question both the existence of ‘the body’ as a pre-existing form and the notion that it would be the property of an ‘I’, of a subject, of a unified self.
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Fragmenting cripistemology: Gap movement and choreographic practice
Authors: Jose Miguel Esteban and Elisabeth MotleyThis article attends to the creative process of our choreographic video essay, Mourning Movements (2023). Between the distances of Tkaranto (Toronto) and Lenapehoking (New York City), we explore approaches and methods for choreographic practice through gaps of space, time and differing corporealities. Theorizing our creative collaboration within these gaps, the methodological framework of fragmentation emerges as a network for disjointed choreographic sense-making. Refiguring our ‘gap’ movement as crip choreographic practice, we consider fragmentation as a basis for a choreography that embraces disability, distance, pauses and non-cohesion. We reflect on our practices of score-work, dance improvisation, audio-description, poetry, storytelling, theoretical provocation, text messaging, Zoom meetings and Google Doc harbouring to reveal our collaborative and care-full labour of creation. We offer a proposal of ‘fragmenting cripistemologies’ which considers fragmentation as reciprocal with disabled knowing and questioning or cripistemology. Our proposal imagines disability as a source for fugitive choreographic practice through which we can potentialize, refuse and reinterpret movement.
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Disordering Dance: Foundations of an emerging neuroqueer choreography
By Aby WatsonThe neurodivergent embodied psyche challenges dance to extend beyond neuronormative conventions. Considerations with how to securely hold divergent modes of thinking, feeling, learning, being and behaving within both the choreographic process and moment of performance are essential. As a choreographer with dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD (with autistic traits) – alongside significant experience of exclusion and trauma from normative dance environments – this inquiry forms the basis of my practice and now the discussion of this article, as I articulate core foundations of my doctoral research and emergent neuroqueer choreographic aesthetic. Instead of focusing on how to support the neurodivergent bodymind in systems of exclusive dance practice, such an aesthetic seeks to radically resist neuronormative performance and creatively embrace neurodivergent embodiments and consciousnesses. This article adopts a critical stance of disordering to challenge taken-for-granted neuronormative assumptions and traditions of mainstream western dance culture. Concepts of neurodiversity are elucidated and practices of neuroqueering are introduced, whilst my own positionality of ‘neurodivergent outsider’ exposes neuronormative tensions within dominant western dance culture. Discussion unfolds that situates neurodivergent modes of mindbodily being through a choreographic lens, embodying neurodivergent-centred practices that support non-neuronormative wellbeing, identity and embodiment for both artist and audience in the present moment of dance performance.
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Choreographing the disabled spectator: Disrupting audience expectations in Dancer and rampa landscape
Authors: Riina Hannuksela, Sydney Erlikh and Kelsie ActonRepresentation of ‘differing bodyminds’ in dance has expanded how dancing bodies are imagined. Examining two performances in Helsinki, Finland, Dancer and rampa landscape: lazy, late, absent through collaborative autoethnography we consider in what ways these works might choreograph for disabled spectators. We argue that choreography addressing disability and neurodivergence that does not consider the diverse access needs of spectators, risks creating hermeneutical injustice. This occurs when individuals experience harm due to their inability to understand or articulate their own experiences. Hermeneutical injustice is characterized by inequitable access to disability knowledge and a declarative approach to access where performances, venues and artists claim to be accessible for spectators without attention to what is necessary for access. Through this process, spectators without access needs have more access to the choreographic knowledge of disability. We alternate our experiences of these performances with reflections on spectator access and draw on framing materials to provide context. We focus on how the performance choreographs for disabled spectators – relating our own embodied experiences and observations as audience members. Ultimately, cripping choreography cannot just involve onstage representation; it must consider and welcome the disabled spectator.
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- Conversation
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Round-table conversation on crip, dance and choreography in Belgium
Belgium is internationally renowned for its vibrant contemporary dance scene. Since the advent of the so-called ‘Flemish Wave’ in the late 1980s, it has been home to not only renowned companies like Rosas, Les Ballets C de la B, Ultima Vez and Damaged Goods but also a thriving community of lesser-known choreographers. Additionally, the country also houses several important art centres for dance, as well as the internationally acclaimed school for contemporary dance, P.A.R.T.S. Amidst this dynamic scene, however, a silence looms – a scarcity of inclusivity, particularly the absence of disabled and crip performers. Even though trailblazing choreographers like Alain Platel and Wim Vandekeybus have long pushed against traditional bodily norms, integrating non-trained dancers into their works, Belgium’s disability-centred dance scene remains relatively small, lagging behind its UK and US counterparts. In this round-table, we – Jonas Rutgeerts and Leni Van Goidsenhoven – joined forces with Fanny Vandesande, Anna Dujardin, Saïd Gharbi, Lisi Estaras and Inge Blockmans to delve into the positioning of disabled dancers and choreographers in Flanders. Together, we explored the burgeoning recognition of disability and crip aesthetics in this vibrant dance landscape.
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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