Choreographic Practices - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

Adapted from cultural geography, the dramaturgical notion of the 'dancing-place' denotes an affective sense of place in regard to a performance site implicating past and present, history and historicity, and relations of hosting and home. The notion furthers dramaturgical thinking about site specificity and lieux and milieux de mémoire to describe dramaturgies of relational history and geographical as well as kinetic returns. From Granada and Grozny to Wall Street, analysis of the dancing-place takes affective moments into account to offer new ways of thinking about how we make and watch dance, in the streets as onstage.

How are dance artists dealing with ideas about environmental change in their everyday practice? How are discourses of environmental change contributing to the development of new ways of thinking about choreographic practice and the role of the dance artist in contemporary society? By sharing portraits of practice of three ecologically concerned dance artists, Eeva-Maria Mutka, Tim Rubidge and Nala Walla, this article offers some insight into what might constitute ecological choreographic practices.

Step Feather Stitch is a duet that emerged from physical, interactive experiences of collaborative scores brought to the studio by members of 'Species of Spaces', process-led artists within dance, performance and visual art. Using Step Feather Stitch as an example, the authors create a pathway through the collaborative making process that reveals something of their creative methods whilst offering fragmentary strands that could be woven into practice. This article is designed to offer text and visual stimuli to act both as moments of documentation and provocation for readers to reinterpret actively. Julie Brixey-Williams and Libby Worth became interested in the way that sewing instructions could be danced and dance instructions sewn. Through this exchange and reinterpretation, the rigid demarcation of boundaries between forms dropped away.

'Oh Monster!' is a dance/theatre/visual art performance piece created jointly by dance artist Ellen Kilsgaard and visual artist Chris Crickmay, who both also perform within it. Starting as a performance research project and then developing into an actual piece, first a solo and then a duet, it has been developed intermittently over a period of four years and performed in a series of showings of work-in-progress in the United Kingdom and more recently in Copenhagen. In giving an account of this particular piece and how it was made, the article comments generally on collaboration, on working across art forms, on working methods in devising, and on the aesthetics of relationship in performance. It also looks in some detail at the use of objects as part of a performance landscape. Underlying all this are ideas about perception, embodiment and image. Taken together these concern the ways in which we relate to the world and make meaning within a performance practice.

In this article notions of continuity and coherence are discussed in relation to Jonathan Burrows' choreographic work, with the aim to problematize their meanings in relation to contemporary artistic practices. Looking at intimate references and personal content of Burrows' work, I explore how representation and signification are constructed and operate in his dance, with a particular focus on three examples from his repertoire: Hymns (1988), The Stop Quartet (1996) and The Quiet Dance (2005). These works are emblematic of the productive contradictions inherent in Burrows' choreographic methods and of the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by the dialogue resulting from the interpersonal and interdisciplinary relationships around which the pieces are constructed. The analysis I propose is based on my observation of the dance material as well as on several personal conversations with Burrows, and draws on postmodern theory, post-structuralist discourse and intertextual methodologies of dance analysis.

Within contemporary performance and dance practices repetition emerges as an important structural and constitutive means. Repetition used in speech, movement and in structure challenges temporalities of experience and explores notions such as exhaustion, difference through repetition, becoming and the possibility of finitude, amongst others. Specifically, Lone Twin Theatre's creative process uses repetition to create a distinct performance vocabulary, which structures its choreographic practice. The present article explores repetition as generative of ways of making, experiencing and writing about performance work. It argues that performances that use repetition invite, in some cases, a repetitive encounter with the performance beyond the live event. This article uses Daniel Hit By A Train to explore Lone Twin Theatre's choreographed repetitions and returns as well as the ways in which performance remains, to use Rebecca Schneider's term, in memory and writing. In giving an account of the re-performances of the live event two kinds of writing are used here: writing as a space within which the performance event takes place again and again, and writing that theorizes the experience of performance in a useful way. The 'choreographic', in this case, is dealt with as the graphein/ writing of the choros/dance, which takes place during the creative process as the repetition in movement, speech and structures, and beyond the performance event itself as repetition's return.