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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
Choreographic Practices - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
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Dear Practice ... : The experience of improvising
More LessDeveloping out of The Choreographic Lab, a research environment at the University of Northampton, United Kingdom, this article takes the form of an (imaginary) exchange of letters between a dancer and her improvisation practice. The letters embody the experience of dancing – physical, emotional and memorial. These corporeal resonances weave throughout the letters giving rise to critical discourses in an exploration of the nature of improvisation. Collectively articulating ontological features of improvisation, the letters are shaped around concepts of vulnerability, intuition and unfolding, regret, (dis)appearance, memory, nomadism and pleasure.
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Improvisation and intimate technologies
More LessThis article investigates the concept and experience of intimacy in creative process, specifically through the complex interaction of human improvisation and digital technologies in performance situations. By looking first at conceptions of intimacy and then at reports by artists working at the performance/technology interface, this article examines how working creatively against resistance can increase the sense of intimacy in the moment of performance. The article goes on to look, in detail, at how these concepts play out in two contemporary performance works: one by the author and one by Dutch theatre artist Dries Verhoeven.
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Architecting sensation: Voice, light and touch
More LessThis article looks at how one might bring together Steven Connor's notions of the 'vocalic body' and 'vocalic space', an understanding of the voice as existing on the tactile or haptic register, Laura Marks' theories of haptic videography and haptic cinema and Juhanni Pallasmaa's concept of a haptic architecture, to understand how voice and light might dance together, and indeed become gesture, in a reaching fashion, towards and with audiences. The article makes reference to work on Bonenfant's performance Beacons.
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Tracking entities: Choreography as a cartographic process
More Less'Tracking entities' is a cartographic essay that takes the idea of topographic exchange between place and body, exploring the relationship between sense, perception and corporeal memory. Underlying an enquiry into developing movement vocabulary in response to a particular terrain, the terms 'proprioception', 'perception' and 'perspective' are examined here in relation to the site-based performance activities of ROCKface, directed by dancer/choreographers Rachel Sweeney and Marnie Orr. Using anatomy maps, poetic writings, cartographic documents and somatic descriptions, this visual essay serves to distinguish ROCKface's choreographic approach in developing a physical approach to land driven by the interaction between dancer and environment where the focus remains on an application of physical and perceptual consciousness within site-based movement practice. The role of sense perception in site-based performance practice is located here through a modern-day palimpsest where initial dance movements acquired in the immediate vicinity of working on site might subsequently be recreated through their inscription, or refinement, to be developed towards distinct choreographic materials. Central to an enquiry into sense perception in contemporary performance practice is the ability of the dancer working in outdoor rural environments to interrelate different senses – in particular, the relation between visual and touch sensation – through a process of physical synaesthesia. Brian Massumi’s term the ‘visceral gaze’ will be adopted to describe the deliberate anatomical re-mapping of proprioceptive faculties regarding kinaesthetic vision in seeking to distinguish a topography of the eye that proposes an inversion of phenomenological processes operating between the seen and the felt within movement processes.
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A free man in Paris: Dance research in action
More LessA solo dance improviser/video artist spends four months in Paris to extend and refine his creative practice of making video self-portraits by improvising for stationery camera and then editing on Final Cut Pro. His process – and the website blog he keeps during his stay – raise questions on the aesthetics and methodologies of making dance for the screen and on the conundrum for a working artist of framing himself or herself within the realm of practice as research (PaR).
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Performance-making as interruption in practice-led research
More LessThis article focuses on discussions on practice-led research that seek to describe the possible relations between theory, practice and various non-dance fields of knowledge. In order to explore some of the specificities of the relations between performance practice research and theory, but also between practice-led research and the professional arts scene, a further examination is made of recent developments in the European contemporary dance scene, where choreography is thought to have expanded, to address theory and to include a wide range of conceptual tools, materials and strategies. In particular, the case of Jérôme Bel is used to demonstrate how, even when one explicitly invokes theory with/in their work, as long as their doing takes place onstage (or within a performance setting), it already speaks to an economy of knowledge that is specific to performance-making, rather than that of performance-writing. Following Susan Melrose's proposition that practice emerges as a singular event that is significantly different from theoretical writing, this article then introduces Alain Badiou's notion of 'the event' as a concept through which to understand practice as a particular type of interruptive operation, in the way it functions to further knowledge within a performance research enquiry. Finally, then, the suggestion is put forward that the practitioner-researcher embraces a task of having to retain a sort of fidelity to whatever shifts or destabilizations occur within the theoretical writing from interruptions caused by performance-making processes.
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Moving Writing
Authors: Jonathan Burrows and Adrian Heathfield
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