Choreographic Practices - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014

This article outlines the ‘Creative Articulations Process’ (CAP), offering ways of coming into knowing in/through/about one’s own dance practice. This process, developed by the authors in the context of The Choreographic Lab, seeks to enrich creative activities through an elaboration tacit knowledge and practice as research. The article establishes the foundations of the process, briefly introducing the work of Hincks, Gendlin and Damasio, alongside others. It then goes on to take the reader through the six facets that form CAP – ‘Opening’, ‘Situating’, ‘Delving’, ‘Raising’, ‘Anatomizing’ and ‘Outwarding’. The article is written to encourage an active engagement, providing strategies and prompts for the artist/researcher.

Choreographer Liz Lerman has evolved methods for dance composition that emphasize a collaborative role for dancers, who participate in the invention of movement by responding to questions, improvisational structures, and research assignments. She attributes the success of this approach in part to her ability to function as an environmentalist, cultivating a setting in which artists can do their best work. In this article she describes two techniques that she has devised, mutual coaching and the Critical Response Process, which afford dancers an active role in shaping choreographic work and assure a constructive atmosphere for critique and collaboration. She reflects on the values of enquiry, learning and mutual respect inherent in these techniques. She illuminates their role in sustaining the daily functioning of a dance company and in nurturing artists with multi-disciplinary capacity as performers, creators, teachers, administrators and community facilitators.

What follows is from the introductory section of the now out of print book, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment, by Lawrence Halprin (George Braziller: New York 1969). The book considers ‘scoring’ as a way in which to make processes visible and as a way of enabling participation. This work was developed with his wife and dancer Anna Halprin. She has utilized and extended the RSVP cycle extensively, using it to elaborate and structure interactions between people within, in particular, community movement practices. The RSVP score makes elements of the creative process visible and seeks to aid communication within artistic collaborations. As such it offers a significant framework for articulation, making accessible that which is usually hidden and implicit. Thereby editors felt that it was an important resource to include in this special issue, encompassing insights into the value of scoring, which might be seen as modes of articulation in their own right, and also because the RSVP cycles offer a way through which creative processes can be better understood.

Josiah Hincks is a Focusing Trainer, now based in Italy, who has worked for many years with artists and performers helping them develop their creative processes. He wrote the ‘Five Facets Model of Creative Process’ originally in 2000 and then offered it to a group of artists and makers in a series of workshops called ‘Lark Rise to Beacon’ (Bath, UK) in 2003. The model intends to support individuals stuck in their creative process who found that this model enabled a significant shift in their working practice and outcomes. It is offered for publication in its original (draft) format with the understanding that, although the model has never been published or developed, Hincks work with artists has developed. Hincks writes that if he were to work on it again today (ten years after originally writing it) he would most probably develop and alter Outwarding. However, it is offered here as a tool for makers and as a stimulus for others wondering about the value of models for the articulation of creative process.

For choreography to be developed as progressive and relevant, it must be specific and act as a translation of both movement and touch, of time and space as conceived realities. Choreography as both action and thinking, develop over time through experience, study and the research that provides expertise needed for specificity. Choreographic practice unfolds in relation to other practices, in relation to traditions, conventions and to cultural attitudes towards both art and politics. In my choreographic work the attitude to the techniques of narration and to language are absolutely decisive. I explore and research this in dialogue with a rapidly changing surrounding world that constantly demands artistic and political positioning. I do, I explore, I evaluate, I discard and occasionally arrive at a good dialogue. I refuse to travel backwards, I like jumping, I fall often and mostly manage to rise with my eyes, my thoughts and my body turned forward. In my text I will elaborate on how.

What if the question, ‘what if every cell in my body at once has the potential to simultaneously perceive beauty and surrender beauty each and every moment as time passes?’ is about the question, without seeking an answer?

In this two part article we reflect upon the experience of writing-dancing with audiences and artists in the context of our installation work skript (commissioned by Dance4, Nottingham, 2013). Part one considers how skript engages embodied, felt sense, improvisational and collaborative modalities in relation to the act of writing. As such we consider the ways in which the particular interface of language and embodiment, which is the focus of skript, might allow a knowing of ‘something’ otherwise – be that something a sense of our own bodies, a dance work, a performance experience or perhaps just that moment in time. In part two we share extracts of some of the writings that were collaboratively generated as part of skript. We focus on the work of three performance/movement artists: Guy Dartnell, Miguel Pereira and Rosalind Crisp. These dance-writings are published as they were written in real time, in the moment of engagement. They are edited only for length and at times to correct typographical errors (but only if the errors seemed to disturb the flow of the ideas) rather than to simply ‘tidy’ the text or the grammar. The writings are relational, improvisational and at times fragmentary. For more writings see: www.writing-dancing.blogspot.com.

The twin questions of what constitutes choreographic knowledge and what traces it may or may not leave behind are perennial concerns in dance. And in recent decades the proliferation of digital media in our lives has radically expanded that question. But there is much to be done as makers and as scholars to trace and transfer dancing ideas and elucidate the processes by which alternative inscriptions come to be. To address this gap in the literature, this article unfolds the working processes and modes of articulation in two recent collaborative projects that have circulated widely and that I co-created at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD): Synchronous Objects (2009) with William Forsythe; and Motion Bank: TWO (2013) with Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert. Together these works question the nature of choreographic thinking and seek to expand the range of meaningful articulations of dancing ideas.

This article will reflect on British choreographer Siobhan Davies and her changing relationship with her own digital archive, Siobhan Davies RePlay, to explore the creative potential of archives for dance artists, and the ways in which artists engage with and intervene in the archival process. With a focus on Davies’ work during and since the creation of the archive, the article will chart the way that her choreography has developed in effect in dialogue with the archive, whether explicit or implicit in her developing choreographic oeuvre. This dialogue has enabled Davies to investigate new ways of conceiving time and space in work that tests the conventions of choreographic practice, creating what might be described as a ‘landscape of vitality’, which reflects back on the archive as an articulation of her creative strategies. Consequently, several projects since the launch of RePlay in 2009 have developed out of Davies attending more closely to her own making process. In particular, the article will dwell on her current project, Table of Contents (2014), and trace the way in which Davies has turned towards her own history, and its representation through RePlay, to test the living potential of the archive. Through a process of reconstructing and reimagining past choreographies she is re-inscribing the archival traces through her dancers’ bodies; archival content is re-embodied, performed by finding its way back into the new work and, in turn, questioning her own choreographic choices.