Choreographic Practices - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016

This transcript replicates Rosemary and Claire’s use of series of (perhaps) contentious statements as a starting point for dialogue around Contemporary Dance in the United Kingdom, which formed a keynote presentation at the Questioning the Contemporary in 21st Century British Dance Practices Symposium (July, 2014). Thinking of the future, they reflect back but mainly ask about what we are doing now and why, since one cannot make work for the future but only for the present. Both believe in the possibility of a truly Contemporary Dance sector in the United Kingdom and bring their own perspectives as practitioners to it – as artist and producer, respectively. How do our systems, knowledge and beliefs impact upon the work we create, the work we value and the way we support and nurture our most important asset, our artists?

This article reports on interim findings from an evolving research project that sets out to examine and document the experiences of hybrid dance artist-academics working across academia and the professional arts sector. Three round table events and an online conversation enabled the capturing of voices of those who operate in academia and the professional arts sector in response to the research project’s three main aims:

• To understand the experiences of the hybrid dance artist-academic

• To shed light upon the contextual factors that shape these experiences

• To offer recommendations that may support a productive, creative practice environment for the hybrid dance artist-academic.

This article further contextualizes commentaries within wider discourse on artistic practice and/or Practice as Research (PaR), such as those from Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) and the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts (ResCen). The relationship between arts-making practices and neo-liberalist frameworks is explored. The emergent issues of hierarchies, dissidence and the epistemology of the hybrid dance artist-academic are presented and conceptions of agency and community are reconsidered.

This article will reflect on the experience of the collaborative process of making and performing Table Of Contents (2013–2014), produced by Siobhan Davies Dance. It follows Professor Sarah Whatley’s article for this journal, ‘Digital inscriptions and the dancing body: Expanding territories through and with the archive’ (Choreographic Practices, 5:1), and seeks to further examine and expand notions of archive from a position within a research, making and performance project. Running alongside the main text are blocks of questions generated within the research and creation process. The origins of these were collectively expressed in extensive conversations by the artistic team and then further processed and translated into my own working notebooks. The references included in this article have been selected because they often acted as a spur/provocation to the thought processes underpinning many of the creative decisions at the time of making. Later in the article, I will focus on one specific making methodology out of the five that I undertook within the project, in order to offer an example of how I addressed the area of archive within the investigation.

This is a list of principles – or perhaps attitudes – of choreographic practice and making. The list is not exhaustive, and indeed comprises many ideas that are so general that they would hold for any kind of making. In such a way they demand that we consider to what extent choreographic making is special at all. Perhaps the list might – as we continue to consider the nature of choreographic practices – help to provoke our questions, our processes, our methods and our choreographies.

The End of Choreography is a commissioned video (2013, https://vimeo.com/80257439), a lecture presentation (2015) and a performative essay (2016). As a PaR project concerned with choreography in the expanded field, these multiple manifestations problematize the notion of the artwork, questioning what impact context has on the reading and the meaning of a work. In this provocation I mix images with written text, use references from different disciplines and historical eras, quote well-known international theorists and philosophers alongside local choreographers and dance practitioners. I also refer to pieces I have seen, read about and participated in. Thus, I create a variety of contexts and reference points, questioning the meaning, value and purpose of choreography at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For this written version of The End of Choreography I collaborated with a graphic designer to present the work in a different medium, exploring the potentialities of translating the video onto the page as a textual document. Rather than presenting a closed argument, my aim is to trigger a debate about the current state of affairs in the field, whether this be the end, or future, of choreography.

The article discusses the written work Perception Frames, a collection of choreographic scores, which is one creative outcome of the author’s larger research project addressing non-representational poetics of twentyfirst-century western choreography. This project takes Gilles Deleuze’s critique of representation and his concern with thinking without recourse to recognition as provocation, orientating these concerns to the practices of choreography. The article gives an account of the research activities undertaken in the development of Perception Frames, followed by an explanation and discussion of its written structure. The perspective of practice is privileged in the articulation of the (experiential) perceptual sensing processes through which Perception Frames operates. The article argues that the scores generate conditions for modes of nonrepresentational thinking on the part of the performer: modes of thinking that operate through the conjoined and processual operations of agency and relations, in an immediacy of perceptual sensing, so producing the choreographic event. The article concludes with the suggestion that the scores stage contemporaneity, understood as a being-with time, and that they offer means for practising a micropolitics of producing in the immediacy of occurring relations.

‘Sawing the legs off chairs in Reckless Sleepers’ A String Section’ considers the present and presence of the moving body, as a living and lived processual, experiential archive. These artist’s pages present and represent a micro-reflection upon the moments of live, experimental, improvisatory performance, rearticulating the possibilities of amassing, revisiting and representing theatrical, performative and daily experience(s) through a specific one-woman perspective. The written micro-reflection as a strand of the archive as identified above is devised as a response to a lengthy multi-stranded association with the practice of the work and its processes, with this written micro-reflection serving to expand upon the creative knowledges of the moving body in archival dialogue with A String Section.

At a time when artists are questioning twenty-first-century dance for its contemporary-ness, this writing exposes a tension that plays across differing choreographic processes – a tension that suggests a widening rift between letting go into collaborative uncertainty and the creation of single authored productions of spectacle. I suggest that a move away from spectacle in the United Kingdom is exacerbated by various wider themes such as practice as research, somatics, digital technology and neo-liberalism, all of which have deeply affected artists’ performance processes. Particular emphasis is given to how shifts in institutionally driven dance training and education are affecting performance, and the writing draws attention to what artists might have in common across the divide – a passionate engagement with how we communicate what we do with others.