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- Volume 9, Issue 2, 2018
Choreographic Practices - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2018
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In search of our aunts’ gardens: Choreographic reconstruction, race and bodily transfer in Black Lōkəs
More LessAbstractThis article is an analysis of a Practice as Research (PaR) project titled Black Lōkəs. Black Lōkəs (2017) is an experimental reconstruction of Trisha Brown’s Locus (1975). This article investigates the possibility of race being used as a creative lens for dance reconstruction, a lens that does not privilege accuracy or fidelity in a traditional sense but seeks to mine the possibility of dance reconstruction as a generative act that moves beyond preservation politics. This article is composed of three connected but distinct sections, including a brief overview of performance studies’ and critical dance studies’ use of the ‘archive’ in performance; a review of Black Lōkəs (2017) by a dance practitioner who also works with the body as archive; and the methodological process and theoretical underpinnings of the creation of Black Lōkəs (2017). This article consults both critical race theorists and dance theorists who, in concert, suggest novel possibilities for and through dance reconstruction and the politics that surround the archival fever in dance making.
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The dance goes on: Following in the footsteps of Rosemary Butcher
More LessAbstractThis article concerns Lauren Potter’s Frames for Falling (2017c),1 a fifteen-minute work for eleven students graduating from London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS), and for which the stimulus was Rosemary Butcher’s Still-Slow-Divided (2002). I trace the artistic and creative background that gave rise to this dance by registering milestones in Rosemary Butcher’s career and investigating her choreographic practice that, echoing the German academic Pirkko Husemann, I define as a ‘critical practice’. Writing from the perspective of practice as research, I chart Potter’s process in the studio when, in the summer of 2017, she created her new dance. Included in the article is interview material from Nigel Butcher, Potter, and one of the participating students, Ryan Jones. There is also a brief sketch of Frames for Falling as it was performed in the Robin Howard Dance Theatre in July 2017. I conclude the article by arguing that under Potter’s expert practical guidance and deep knowledge of Butcher’s choreographic process, the LCDS students engaged in a new form of dance history, studying it as they did in the context of physical studio practice.
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The brutal encounters of a novice b-girl
More LessAbstractI am a 50-year-old novice b-girl and in this article, I examine how breaking has prompted ontological and epistemological shifts that move me literally and metaphorically. I reflect upon the brutal encounters of learning the improvisational technique of breaking as a middle-aged woman. In conversation with a practice-as-research methodology, I employ excerpts from my breaking journal, instructions and tips from my technique notebook, and a reflective voice that place ‘doing’ at the centre of knowledge production. From this I come to understand concepts of drilling, grit, flavour and cyphering, and I engage in alternative models of learning, collective pedagogy and community belonging. With a commitment to description as a mode of theorizing, I demonstrate how the process of learning breaking enables me to encounter the aesthetics and history of the b-girl body, confront my present identity position, and begin to reimagine the social and physical expectations of my body.
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Double Take – dance duets in the public realm
Authors: Claire Hicks, Neil Callaghan, Maria Hassabi, Sioned Huws, Simone Kenyon and Heather ForknellAbstractPhoto essay created as part of a larger performative project exploring what it means to put contemporary dance practice into public spaces and the experience and drive to place this work unexpectedly into the public realm. The duets by Neil Callaghan and Simone Kenyon, Maria Hassabi and Sioned Huws where all conceived to be presented outside of traditional theatre settings but would in other circumstances be unlikely, with their focus on repetition, stillness, a relationship with the floor, be put within the mainstream space of a UK summer seaside town, outside of any festival or art show.
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Dancing to (re)connect: Somatic dance experiences as a medium of connection with the more-than-human
Authors: Brittany Laidlaw and Tanja BeerAbstractMany scholars suggest that the primary reason for our current state of socio-ecological crisis is the persistent social construct of human–nature dichotomies. This dualism implies that humans are separate from and superior to nature, leading to erosion of our intrinsic and codependent relationship with the natural world. Nature is commonly framed as something out there beyond the city – to be controlled, conserved or commandeered for human utility. A surge of researchers and practitioners have advocated for the importance of (re)connecting with the more-than-human as a transformational tool for developing more ethical relationships with our environments. Research shows that effective forms of connection must be felt through the multi-sensory feeling body, not just the thinking mind. This article examines the case of somatic dance as a potential tool for reclaiming our embodied connection with the more-than-human world. In doing so, it highlights the capacity of dance to cultivate a sensory-informed world-view of interdependency and hence, responsibility. Using Laidlaw’s own practice-led research as the primary mode of enquiry, the investigation draws upon theories across materiality, phenomenology, object-oriented ontology, ecosophy and somatic ecology to explore how somatic dance experiences can be used to build a greater understanding and connection with our environments. We identify five steps for facilitating more-than-human embodiment through somatic dance experiences, including: (1) an open willingness to surrender; (2) whole-body listening; (3) moving as one; (4) finding identity through place-making; and (5) reverence and gratitude. These steps not only provide new insights into the potential for somatic dance experiences to connect to the more-than-human, but also the significance of dance as an ecological necessity and stewardship responsibility.
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Joint action and joint attention: Dance improvisation and children’s physical play as participatory sense-making activities
More LessAbstractIn this article dance improvisation and children’s physical play events are considered organizational practices. Both activities organize and reorganize our lived and embodied experience. Even more, both activities are socially shared and culturally shaped – and thus highly relational. According to the enactive approach, sense-making evolves out of self-organizational processes in which brain, body and environment are linked. In this article the concept of participatory sense-making is used as a stepping stone to describe underlying mechanisms of both dance improvisation and children’s physical play. It is argued that the participants in a dance improvisation and physical play event coordinate their movements together and meaning is created and transformed through a shared intercorporality. The first part of the article consists of a theoretical exploration of several related concepts such as enactive account, embodiment, autonomy, experience, emergence and (participatory) sense-making. In the second part the theoretical concepts are applied to dance improvisational practice and physical play. Artistic research is used to shed light on underlying mechanisms that children’s physical play and dance improvisation share with one another, specifically how meaning is co-constituted in the direct embodied interaction.
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The Possibilities of Different Geographies
Authors: Jane Carr and Bruce SharpAbstractThe Possibilities of Different Geographies is the title of a dance work Jane Carr and Bruce Sharp first created in 1997 that investigated the significance of human embodiment. Twenty years later they revisited the themes informing their earlier work in order to create a participatory performance-installation focused on the significance of the embodied dimensions of inter-subjective experience.
The authors present the philosophical and political ideas underpinning their aims to challenge the boundaries that act as limits upon how humans experience their embodied identities and reflect on how, in developing the project, artistic and activist principles became interwoven. They describe the creation of movement scores for participants to perform and consider how elements of movement, sound, lighting and opportunities for reflection contribute to an environment that affords creative participation focused on the inter-corporeal dimension of human geographies.
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And how to be in three places at once: A collaborative experiment
More LessAbstractWritten together as AGA Collaborative, a trio of performer-choreographers, this piece digs into what is embodied in how we make dances. It reflects on our practices and considers the values embedded in our collaboration. As a manifestation of our working process, this writing, like our work together, makes claims about our experience, but acknowledges its temporality. Reflecting on what we have learned and defined thus far, we are open to it looking or feeling different tomorrow.
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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