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- Volume 36, Issue 203, 2021
Maska - Volume 36, Issue 203-204, 2021
Volume 36, Issue 203-204, 2021
- Editorial
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- Article
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- Interview
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I don’t do performances, I’m a dancer
By Dejan SrhojI poured myself a bit of rakija, everyone in the flat was asleep, the light was dim and almost no sounds entered from the outside. I was browsing through documents, thoughts, photos and audio collages of Chrysa’s research project ‘Documenting experimental authorship’. I was listening to her podcast titled Value of Dance as Practice. I got immersed in her voice, in handwritten pages, in words that became poetry, in details of space that shape her dance. And after a very long time I felt someone was speaking my language, the language of a dancer. I knew I had to talk to her. The following interview happened online on a Tuesday afternoon, in December 2020.
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- Articles
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What would be another word for it?
More LessThis is the score for a performed talk called ‘What would be another word for it?’, which is about practice, but also about the difficulty of describing the experience of practicing. It was written for a Stockholm series curated by Chrysa Parkinson, and was kind of a conversation with a video on practice she’d made some years before. At the time of writing I’d also started playing English folk music with a concertina player called Will Duke, who was making me re-think what music and dance practice might be. Both of these people are mentioned in the text. The second time I gave the talk I thought it should be more physical, so I memorized the words until the rhythm was in my body. This is also a practice that Chrysa Parkinson uses in her talks. Throughout the memorized performance I started and stopped a slow-motion projection of the dancer Katye Coe, altered by the filmmaker Hugo Glendinning so that Katye seemed to hover always on the edge of stopping, and the faces of the people watching were frozen in slow reaction. And between segments of speaking, I played a small button accordion and a harmonica, both instruments I practice every day. The button accordion is not an instrument usually associated with improvised contemporary dance, and I enjoyed how the connection between the film and my music was in the practice and not in the style. You will see that the score has marks indicating when I should start and stop the film, and when I should start and stop the music. Many dancers describe the way they vocalize while moving, making something like a low grunting sound, too quiet to be heard. If this text is choreographic, then it’s something to do with that kind of grunting, which is a feeling connected to rhythm and emphasis, and also to a sense of reaching out, from here to there.
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- Letter
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- Articles
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On dance dramaturgy
By Guy CoolsIn 1994, Marianne Van Kerkhoven, the Flemish godmother of dance dramaturgy wrote a short, seminal article on the subject – ‘Looking without pencil in the hand’ – of which the title alone is already a manifesto. This contribution builds further on Van Kerkhoven’s insights: how the dramaturge has to stay necessarily invisible in the creative process (s)he is supporting; how in order to capture this invisible role, a lot of metaphors have been created. It continues with looking at the different roles of the authors’ own practice: that of somatic witness, dialogue partner and editor. It concludes reasserting the practice of the (dance) dramaturge as a creative practice in which the whole body is involved and in which somatic proximity to the creative process is as important as critical distance.
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The principles of feminist dramaturgical thinking in dance and performance
More LessThis text is offering an overview of principles of feminist dramaturgical thinking, that have been identified and used in research on feminist dramaturgy through theoretical and practical work on the performance Still to Come, a Feminist Pornscape. Some of the principles are: the principle of bell hooks, the principle of relationality, the principle of significant otherness, the principle of negative capability, the principle of critters, and they can be related to a variety of aspects of politics and ethics in artistic practice. The text is an ending chapter of The Feminist Pornscapes, on Feminist Dramaturgical Thinking in Dance and Performance Practice book and is intentionally only sketching the current reach of the proposed principles with the wish to welcome the reader into a conversation, to pave the way for more thorough elaborations that are still to come.
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Voice fact(s)
More LessMy contribution is aiming to assemble some of the voices that were passing through my body during the last ten years of work as a ‘dance dramaturge’. Brought together into this incongruent assemblage, they are all singing in polyphony: that there is no voice without language and no language without voice. That disorderly multiplicity logically precedes any claim toward singular identity. And that it is this originating multiplicity which defines the only reasonable notion of community – which is, for better or for worse, our only real dwelling.
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Dance, voice, speech, sound
Authors: Rok Vevar and Irena Z. TomažinThis text is part of a research collection of examples that we selected for the workshop On Voice and Dance for the European Dancehouse Network at the international contemporary dance festival CoFestival 2020 together with Irena Z. Tomažin, a dancer, experimental musician and choreo-vocalist, who has given the contemporary dance community in Ljubljana some excellent performances in this field, in which the body and the voice posed a series of puzzling problems for us. The text is a selective outline of the topics at hand, it goes into the history of contemporary dance, cites some fundamental reference articles and books, to which many others could certainly be added. It focuses on selected aspects of choreo-vocalistics, the sound of the body and choreographies, and aims to use this material to inform further research with the help of considerably more ambitious thinkers. Last but not least, it is a product of last year’s CoFestival curatorial topic, The Amplifiers of Voices, with which we wanted to give some attention to the silenced voice of contemporary dance in a pandemic situation with empty stages. This article has no illusions that it could capture and address the topic in its immense complexity and comprehensiveness, and we apologize to the dancers we have unintentionally omitted in our treatment.
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- Interview
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- Articles
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Jump into my throat!
By Jule FlierlIn this text I will leap into some of my recent experiences with you. I will start with describing a moment during performing, then I will talk about how listening became a voice practice in the Aerosol Lab, and tell you how my voice showed itself to me as a technology that is not identical with my Self – in a self-interview. I will send the imaginary of my conflicted voice-body-relation on an adventure in a piece of autofiction and I will introduce some loose references that accompany me on my path of figuring out what role voice has in the dancing body and in the dance field.
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Counter-voicing in the avant-garde and experimental music: Selected cases
More LessThe present article is a reworking of a lecture that was performed live and with visual and sound examples at the CoFestival. In selected examples, the author tries to articulate various vocal practices through contemporary and experimental music, performative practices and sound poetry, in which the voice escapes gender, meaning, turns into noise, and emerges through the utterances of silence.
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- Book review
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The politicality of a poetic practice
More LessDaniela Perazzo Domm
Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
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