Choreographic Practices - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013

As city-based artists, Kazuo Ohno and Stephanie Skura each create for themselves excursions into ‘nature’, which are departures from their daily modern, urban lives, plus fecund sources for their artistic practices. Ohno and Skura are part of the tradition in dance of turning to and connecting with nature, but are distinct from it in their practices – and the effects in the practitioner – of embodying and ‘becoming’ images. Paradoxically, Ohno’s and Skura’s embodiment of imagery from nature cultivates experiences of alterity, which yields aesthetics of inclusion.

This article has arisen out of a pleasure in the abundance and unexpectedness of the lived experience and its connectivity with the performative experience. It is written in a spirit that acknowledges the need to reflect while accepting the inherent impossibility of language to adequately capture the immediacy of the improviser’s world, a world in which acausal connections subvert the seriousness of the research imperative. The writing intentionally blurs the line between the physical practice and the teaching of improvisation, the lived and the written experience, through a consideration of pattern and coincidence. I aim to reflect on the relationship of improvisation as it is taught and performed and it’s perceived connection to everyday life. The word aim here is important, in that improvisation refuses to be neatly categorized or pinned down, and while I attempt to draw some conclusions about how the recognition of pattern may be a pointer towards certain human qualities, the enquiry remains open ended, spiracular.

This article is an idea for screen collaboration that places at its centre not spectacle but corporeality as well as being a reflection on the process of translation to the screen of UK choreographer Ben Wrights’ duet Passing Strange and Wonderful (2007).1 The image that tries to show us how we experience the surface of space through skin, or of the difference between glancing contact and full body impact, is trying to bring the viewer closer to the dancer’s experience, not by showing what she sees, but what she senses. The writing explores Brannigan’s idea of a corporeal mise-en-scène (2011) and suggests a meeting place for the choreographer and the film-maker where we might begin the process of translation from live to screen by asking what we know about the experience of dancing, of space and of the body and what we might discover through creating images of this knowledge.

This article considers issues of legacy and tradition alongside the impact of choice on the choreographic processes involved in restaging modern/contemporary works by Merce Cunningham, Jose Limón and Doris Humphrey. The work of these three choreographers represents a cross-section of staging practices that have evolved over time as a response to the absence of the choreographer. The relevance of these practices in a broader context is that they demonstrate possibilities for choreographers working today whose work is significant to our cultural heritage.

This article discusses the process of choreographing labour in Work Songs, a practice as research investigation in dance theatre that poses the question: how is labour as such made present and perceptible within the representational frame of the theatre? Work Songs was created between November 2011 and December 2012 by Broderick Chow and Tom Wells (The Dangerologists) and has been seen in London, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh and Gießen, Germany. Departing from Karl Marx’s analyses of abstract and concrete labour, the article describes the economic and social context of post-Fordist production and financial capitalism to which this piece is a response. It then discusses the apparatuses of theatre and dance in terms of their ‘erasure’ of labour through, respectively, dramatic representation and naturalized virtuosity. It then argues that the perception of labour as such within the frame of the theatre is directly related to the interlinked dynamics of temporality and materiality – when narrative/chronological temporality is suspended, materiality is made present. This is demonstrated in Work Songs by the insertion of blockages into the smooth flow of its choreography, and the suspension of its dramatic narrative.

This investigation into the copyright implications of the controversy arising from pop star Beyoncé’s choreographic ‘borrowings’ from a work by postmodern dance choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker interrogates the doctrines that determine not only the limits of the rights of authors to control the use of their works but also the rights of users of dance works in certain ‘permitted acts’. The principal aim is therefore to create a greater awareness of copyright in choreographic practice and to argue the proposition that choreographers and their representative organisations take a more proactive stance to seek legal and legislative determinations of their copyright problems so as to generate greater clarity in the administration of dance copyright in order to ensure that choreographers are placed on par with other authors in their enjoyment of copyright.