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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
Choreographic Practices - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian HeathfieldAbstractThis exchange, conducted over the period of a year, examines the relation between choreography and language, movement and writing, in relation to the aesthetics of contemporary dance. Moving from the authors’ different perspectives as a dancer and choreographer, and as a writer and curator, the dialogue questions the place of writing practice within dance creation, and the relative forces of corporeal and poetic expression. Turning over these questions in their different ways, the authors engage with the relations between the spontaneous and the pre-scripted, freedom and constraint, presence, authority and the free play of meanings.
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Practices of un-disciplining: Notes on the interface of dance and moving image in performance
Authors: Chrissie Harrington and Aparna SharmaAbstractThis article articulates a series of creative practices in which ‘un-disciplining’ becomes central to making inter-disciplinary Dance-Moving Image (Dance-MI) performance. In this context Dance-MI performance implies the discourses between the live body and moving image within a performance whole. Motivating questions are: what sorts of interface processes could be devised and what would happen as a result? The integration of theory and practice is central to our interrogations and inspires movement, MI and sound materials. The article dwells on the processes by which movement and MI materials are generated and placed in dialogue with each other, and the complex potentials of those relationships. Practices recognize and build upon the specificities, overlaps and disparities between both Dance and MI, catapulting each form out of its determined disciplinary confine into spaces where sharing, exposing and recreating inspire new choreographies and thus new experiences for maker, performer and viewer. We articulate stilling, connecting and sensing as key concepts that emerge from our practice and are exemplified in selected works created by and with undergraduate students. The un-disciplining of Dance and MI as two movement-based forms liberate each to interface with the other and so create a new wholeness of experience that in turn privileges multiple perspectives over any singular vantage point. The article concludes by positing Dance-MI performance as experiential through a newness created by the co-presence and interaction between both forms – dance and moving image.
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Beneath the surface of the event: Immanent movement and the politics of affective registers
More LessAbstractThis article articulates the equation between subjectivity and time through performance. It discusses ways in which choreographic strategies of stillness and slowness have the capacity to interrupt the distribution of the senses and thus affect the production of subjectivity. In doing so I consider a series of solo performances titled Pressure Points (2010–2012). In this work, the act of crawling backwards in slowness, coupled with stillness and close proximity, aimed to shift the perceptibility of movement from kinetic to kinesthetic registers. The argument is positioned in relation to Erin Manning’s notion of ‘incipient action’ and Jacques Rancière’s ‘Distribution of the sensible’. These frameworks are expanded upon by being placed in the context of the turn to conceptual choreography of the early 1990s.
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Editing I Will Not Hope
More LessAbstractThis article discusses I Will Not Hope, a Screendance made in 2013, which involved a group of people trying to catch falling leaves in autumn. It is the last in a trilogy of Screendance works, by the author, that explore the tension between predictability, stillness and death, and contingency, movement and life. The analysis focuses, on the significance of I Will Not Hope’s editing, specifically the tension, referred to by film theorist Doane, between the edit as the creator of narrative predictability, and the edit as the creator of stillness, the creator of endings. In it I suggest that I Will Not Hope offers a connection between the ontological status of film, with its combination of contingency and structure embodied in the edit, and the relationship of these elements within the experience of hope.
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Dispositioned intimacy
By Stuart GrantAbstractThis article addresses fundamental issues raised by a site-specific performance research project conducted by two dancers on rush hour trains and station platforms. Emerging from this moving, fleeting environment, characterized by a placiality and temporality of passingness, this project highlights questions of relationships between intimacy, time, place and movement. These questions are addressed using Martin Buber’s philosophy of the primacy of the I–You relation and Edward S. Casey’s schema of the co-constitution of place and self through the body. Although the rush hour train is a very specific and limited environment, the precariousness of its inhabitation serves to reveal something of the basic processes by which emplacement and intimacy take hold. Site-based performance generally explores place in its endurance and rootedness. These performances in trains reveal place in its slow tenuousness rather than in its apparent obduracy.
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Reinventing the past: Rosemary Butcher encounters Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts
More LessAbstractThis article discusses British choreographer Rosemary Butcher’s reinvention process in the context of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. It argues that the connection to Kaprow’s first Happening from 1959 was meticulously processed by Butcher on a conceptual level, and that her 2010 reinvention, commissioned and presented at London’s Royal Festival Hall as part of ‘Move: Choreographing You’, was conceptually much closer aligned to Kaprow’s Happening than the actual live work might have suggested. Within this context the article enters established debates around choreographic adaptations and raises questions related to the ways archived performance work might be processed in order to produce ‘new’ signature practice, in Susan Melrose’s terms. It adopts Jean François Lyotard’s notion of the ‘dispositif’, or set-up, in order to explicate Butcher’s reinvention process.
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Dancing with myself, oh oh oh
By Simon EllisAbstractThis writing is an attempt to draw together a number of diverse ideas about information, curation, friendship and identity, and to consider these in relation to experiences of dancing on and around screens. Much of the writing might be thought of as playfully experimental, and in it I reflect on what it is like to be a choreographer in this rapidly changing time, and how technology might be valued, abandoned, questioned and even used as a tool for listening. As a choreographic artist working amongst the eclecticism and noise of contemporary dance influences and practices, I propose that acts and experiences of solitude and silence might help us make sense of the complex choreography of our social and artistic lives.
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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