Choreographic Practices - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017

In 2012 artist Tino Sehgal created These Associations, the last in the Unilever series of commissions for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London. Within this space Sehgal transformed and challenged the role of the public and ‘participants’ or interpreters in the creation of a relational art piece which represents ‘[…] a direct response to the shift from a goods to a service-based economy’ (Bishop 2004: 54). In common with earlier works by Sehgal, and with the ‘social turn’ of relational aesthetics, These associations (2012), is centrally concerned with alternative modes of production. And as has been extensively noted elsewhere (Umathum 2009, Pape, Solomon and Thain, 2014, Green 2017) Sehgal is uninterested in adding to the ever-increasing mass of objects in the world. Instead he asks; how do we think of production in our times? How (and what) can we produce without producing objects?

Through investigating writing as dancing, this work seeks to access, reveal and amplify the voice of danceras-writer in the production of new texts as embodied fictions. Harnessing processes of the response project and an emergent theory of radical impermanence, the dancer-as-writer is agent in inhabiting energetic states and scores practiced in dance improvisation to write like she dances. The provocation in this early catalogue of research is that the liveness of dance can potentially continue through, and be revealed in, the decision-making of writing; to make visible the dancer in a performance you can hold in your hands. The work in she writes like she dances is both an assertion of deep commitment to the liveness of improvisation, and a suspected betrayal.

In this article, I focus on the work of Irish choreographer Joan Davis in order to draw out a debate on the value offered by somatic movement approaches to the field of immersive performance. Such works immerse audiences and performers in sensory, site-based and participatory performance. There has been a recent surge in the popularity of immersive theatre experiences and scholarship on this topic, with the writings for example of Alston, Harvie, Machon and White examining issues such as the agency of audience members and the relationship between individual freedom and group responsibility. What do somatic performances, which often physically immerse participants in outdoor environments, found spaces or designed installations, have to offer this field of theory and practice? Drawing on ideas in environmental theatre and performance ecology, including the work of Reeve, Kershaw and Schechner, I explore the relationship between people, sites, objects and wildlife in somatic performances as part of a whole ecology in shifting negotiation. I propose that although active, individual, experiential participation is part of these performances, body– mind reflective engagement in relationship to context is a vital contribution that somatics can offer to immersive practice more generally. This will be discussed in relation to Joan Davis’ Maya Lila project (2002–15), as she invites participants to become aware of their behaviours within installation environments, as a means to explore being within and separate from a community, and challenging expectations, perceptions and actions.

This article returns to the improvisatory practice of Los Angeles-based choreographer, Susan Rose and her 1978 dance work, Light Contradictions. Analysis of the rule-based improvisation illuminates a critical choreographic practice based on parallel processing and power plays that has sustained in performance for four decades. Reliant on its simple rules, Light Contradictions makes its main message known: Do what I say as I say it, and I’ll do whatever you tell me to. The doing and saying duet appears friendly enough as an arrangement based on equal parts. What ensues, however, is the hysteria of two people – or several sets of two – as they aim to draw out a boundless repertoire of tasks and actions by way of bossing each other around. As the piece travels, rotating performers and crowds, it acts as a platform for keen interpersonal provocation and cultural exchange, simultaneity and contradiction.

Flow! is an open-stage performance event that sees dancers in close conversation with spoken word artists. From its roots in the United States, slam poetry has become a cultural phenomenon, touching the hearts and minds of those involved in the hip hop genre and that of modern literature. Over the years, the lines between this form of performance and other arts have begun to blur. Flow! takes this a step further, allowing the spoken word to entwine itself with the human body. This event sees a succession of duets and group performances, teaming up poets with dancers to showcase their art forms collaboratively. Each pair locks, pops, spits and rhymes their way through a spontaneous set. Using the experience of previous Flow! artists and workshop participants, and examples of other projects and research into improvisatory practices and dance/spoken word collaboration across the United Kingdom, we look at elements of divided attention for the artists and the audience. We expand this to include the time lapse that can occur when one art form responds to another in order to inform a discussion around a dancer’s improvisatory decision-making process. To do this, we analyse the concepts used in Flow! as three separate voices, offering differing perspectives on how the dancer’s mind responds to new spoken word stimuli.

Berthing Bone (Gray, 2014) is a poem composed during the devising, filming and editing of an artists’ moving image film. Conceived as a series of choreographed sculptures for the hands, the film performs a close-reading of the hand. Throughout the process of filming and post-production, a poetic text was written with the intent of performing an equally close, specifically kinaesthetic reading of the hand. During the exhibition of the film, the poem was performed live, alongside the screening. In the following artists’ pages, the poem is transferred from the mouth to the page, and is accompanied by four stills from the Berthing Bone film. The reader is invited to read the poem aloud.

In this article, I will discuss a piece of practice entitled After the Future: A Homage to Bifo, which was performed in June 2012 and April 2013, and now exists as a video work (https://vimeo.com/74394747). Through discussing the work, I will explore the possibilities of choreography as the practice of editing words and movements. As the project is preoccupied with the relationship between humans and technology it asks where meaning resides – in the body, in between bodies, in the voice, in gestures, in words, in spoken or written language, in movement language, in languages of the body. I will expand on ideas on the shifting role of the choreographer from author to editor, the dancer as copyist, performance as a ‘catching-up’ in time and place and the implications of a continued understanding of choreography as a theoretical and a practical field of study.

How do new materialist perspectives for decentring the human, and instead attending to the forces of ‘things’, productively address misalignments between ‘dance’ and ‘choreography’ within Western concert dance? Could the non-human kinetics of ‘thinking-feeling’ be foregrounded in performance and what new tools would be required for dancers and audiences to perceive it? How might dance artists propose frames in which these ‘animating circumstances’ might unfold and be shared as the movement of thought? From 2011 to 2015, artist/scholars Megan Nicely and Kate Elswit explored these questions in a studio practice, stage performance, installation and series of workshops titled Animation Project. The process that this article chronicles brought together various strands of philosophical, embodied thought from the work of João Fiadeiro, Deborah Hay, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning and Jane Bennett.

This practice-led research is situated at the intersections between spatial design, somatics, sound art, sitebased performance and social choreography. A creative practice that thinks through doing, it interrogates the potential of a choreoauratic site-based performance practice to bring attention to the politics of public places, somatically, architecturally, and socially.

A new term choreoauratics is cultivated out of this practice-led research. It argues for the convergence of prosthetic listening and choreography as a critical spatial practice. Participatory choreographies intervene in public spaces, working poetically towards a recovery of the imperceptible, disappearing and the lost. Performing in the margins, the practice orchestrates an emergent form of public activism.

Social choreographies for the ears affect and politicise the way we inhabit and incorporate spaces. A new kind of subjectivity emerges through headphonic sound technologies and choreography. This activates the subject and the city in collisions and convergence, coming together in the striated, dispersed virtual space of listening prosthetically. Engaging in the unspectacular, the practice treads lightly, tuning into the intensities of the poetic, sound, the voice, place and the moving body.