Choreographic Practices - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2015

In this article, a dance of my imagining draws upon topics of embodiment, imperfection and lack of art, political art, implicatedness, boredom and being stupid. Questions of abstraction and records of thought hinge on discussions of disembodied movement, technology and performance. Key choreographic works include Blue Muffins; Bill T. Jones, GHOSTCATCHING; Troika Ranch, and Interactive Installations. Key sources include Susan Kozel’s Closer (2007); Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind (2012); and Francisco Varela’s, The Embodied Mind (1991). The article explains movement and stillness as bodily enactments that can be arrested and recorded in arts technologies. Such records become part of why we care to make art, and how we make it matter.

This article draws on my experience of making and performing Shift, spin, warp, twine (2014) to explore the complex, messy relationship between people and things. Combining reflections on the practice with scholarship from a range of disciplines concerned with the study of material culture, it offers some thoughts on the potential of working with things in performance.

If the body is understood as a dynamic process of materialization, a becoming in relation to the world of which it is a part, then to engage with the movement behaviours of other forms of life is to orient the becoming of the body towards other ways of being in the world. Through its engagement with the movements and bodies of non-human plant and animal life, Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive (SNHA) enacts a posthuman ethics, disrupting ‘the human’ with corporeal possibilities made available through the practice of embodiments derived from Cronin’s encounters with non-human others.

This article takes the 2013 evening-length dance Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which was loosely based on the life and career of pioneer Ruth St. Denis (1878–1968), and examines it from an auto-ethnographic point of view, tackling two main issues. The first stems from the piece’s own central question and is a self-reflexive examination of Orientalist practices within contemporary dance-making, particularly the author’s, engaging St. Denis as a foil and a sounding board. The second question driving the work is an investigation of the influence that an archive, in this case St. Denis’s and her early twentieth-century corpus, can have on a contemporary choreographic investigation. The writing here is from an artist’s perspective, seeking to uncover how historical approaches to choreographic structuring can interface with current dance practices and uses of the body.

A performer’s poems: written from the precarious and fragile, evocative alchemistic moments that butoh (re)presented for me…on this day, in and for that moment. Penned immediately following three consecutive day, outdoor events, these words capture my body-as-participant in Kokoro Dance’s 19th Annual Wreck Beach performances, Vancouver, Canada (July 2014). The poems chart the subtle fluidity and changing landscape – internally/externally – of each fresh performance. Performing in the waters of British Columbia’s west coast was particularly resonant following the Fukushima disaster (directly relating ‘our’ butoh back to its origins as a response to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – and these poems capture in their essence one woman’s quest to understand and relate to the built and the meltdown of ‘environment’ through a somatically, embodied ecological perspective.

Embedded and woven through these lines are references specific to choreographic elements of the piece, the location, the timing and/or local Indigenous Musqueam legends….from the Argentina vs. Germany World cup, to the sand dunes, to Xe-ls, the Creator… their imbrication enlivens the congruency of what was birthed on the beach, and the particulars are designed to conflate our understanding of the potency (and urgency) demanded of our/this place and time. My poetry is movement, simultaneously holding within its lexicon a tension between understanding, applicability, the local and the universal. My poetry is a butoh dance open to your interpretation. I offer it as a gift….

These Associations (2012) by British-German artist Tino Sehgal was commissioned as the thirteenth, and final, artwork of the Unilever Series. It took place in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall between July and October 2012. As one of the people involved in the project and as a practice-based researcher, I am in a curious critical position: both deeply involved and immersed in the work, yet also striving to retain a degree of critical distance. From a methodological position I have the double privilege of ‘having been there’, not only as an observer, a spectator, a visitor, a viewer or an on-looker of the work but also as a participant in the work. In this article I take full advantage of the inside/outside perspective, proposing that it is possible to speak critically from within the art object.

This article considers two ‘choreographic objects’, Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced (2009) and Using the Sky (2013). In response to articulations from performance researchers Scott deLahunta and Bojana Cvejic´, I outline the ways in which such objects can be seen as ‘poetics’. Drawing on ideas arising in literary theory from Gérard Genette, and dance studies from Laurence Louppe, I consider how the scores utilize technology to draw together articulations about the process of dance making with the resonance of the body in performance.

This article seeks to explore the shifting sense of identity experienced in collaborative choreographic practices. In this critical discussion I develop a concept of collaboration based upon my collaborative work in two specific practical enquiries. I reflect on how each practice accounts for a collaborative site of multiple selves; or better perhaps, I want to suggest that collaboration in dance research can on the one hand reveal the tension between self and other; and on the other hand it belongs to a process that tends towards the experience of a plurality of selves. The critique of the self as an individual entity is nothing new. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic view of subjectivity, for example, has permeated the discourse on collaboration in performance studies since the 1990s. However, the entanglement of digital and computational technologies with our human experience has further deepened the gap between the subject as a singular, unified individual and the sense of multiplicity expressed through computational-associated terms such as the networked or distributed self. If contemporary subjectivity is foremost relational, what might collaborative dance research illuminate in relation to distributed subjectivities? The essay considers the relationship between the plurality of self that I have experienced as a performer/choreographer engaged in (collaborative) practice as research and the specificity of process and product which has emerged out of these collaborations.

This article addresses participation through audience interventions in the work of Quick Shifts Improvisation Collective. It reflects upon a range of approaches taken by Quick Shifts that invite audience members to participate in the development of their improvised dance performances. These modes of participation in Quick Shifts’ practice and types of audience interventions are also considered in light of how they satisfy a broader social objective of cultural inclusivity and social value that can be equal to the aesthetic interests of Quick Shifts’ artistic goals. Encouraging audience interventions has implications for the performers, the model of practice and the audience members themselves, and through examining six specific examples from Quick Shifts’ body of performance work, these implications are revealed and analysed. Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) is used to explain and critique the design of the scores, and reveals issues of signalling the audience in the unconventional performance mode of improvised dance. The authors’ interrogation of the potential for the audience to be implicated as co-authors in the work begins to open up questions about what is effective and less effective in participation during improvised dance and to what extent do they, as participating performers, relinquish (or not) control of the work in response to such audience interventions.