Choreographic Research

This dissertation is a conversation upon process, creation and relation. It focuses on the collaborative choreographic practice I developed within my MA in Choreography at University College of Falmouth.
Drawing upon my experience, the essay approaches the processes that constitute a collaborative choreographic practice: the genesis and evolution of the articulation process, the collaboration, the performance, and the process
that begins at the performance and depends on the relation that each spectator will develop with it.
In doing so, the essay, wants to reflect upon the landscapes of relations that may develop in any of the stages described above, and the possibilities for discourse upon ethics in art practices that lie in these relationscapes.
The text follows the evolution of the process: from a prearticulated idea towards the actual performance. In between it invites a dialogue between theory and practice upon certain aspects of the process such as collaboration,
the relation between choreographer and performer and the relation developed between a performance and its audience.
Between is a key word to this essay- The essay concludes that inbetween is where creation lies, regarding all the above-mentioned relationscapes: Between the choreographer and the dancer/ the viewer and the performer, the words and the reader, creation happens in the interval between, within the developing relation.

Anachoresis in Greek is defined as an act of departure, a withdrawal from the world, a term related to what we are currently experiencing in the crisis of the pandemic. ANEW is a choreographic response to the current abruptness of withdrawal from public space, part of the Anachoresis project occupying the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17 th International Architecture Exhibition / La Biennale di Venezia which suggests new ways of being or living together. The artistic questions shaping the score for movement in ANEW focus on re-imagining and recreating new spatial and social contracts in search of new relationships between individuals, within constructions of domestic spaces and cities.

The better quality pdf is downloadible from here: "http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LEAVol19No3-Mailman.pdf
Through recent artistic practices and technology of interactive systems for music, composition and improvisation have more and more blended and interconnected with each other – a sui generis situation now called comprovisation. The concept of comprovisation applies equally well to the spontaneous generation and manipulation of computer graphics, especially as such graphics are systematically coordinated audio-visually, while being subject to spontaneous manipulation by a performer.
This is explained in terms of the Fluxations and FluxNoisations Human Body Interfaces, interactive dance systems that generate music and graphics spontaneously in response to hand and body movement. They enable spontaneous expressive shaping of coherent complexity and variety. Thus a multi-layered multimodal experience arises. The aesthetic experience of this multimedia spectacle relates to experiences of various prior music and visual art of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, as well as to hypothetical physical realities. Thus a kind of cybernetic phenomenology of art is pursued and enacted through an embodied cybersynthesis of art with simulated alternate reality. Call it a pragmatic speculative realism, an adventurous technoetic ‘what if.’ As compared to more traditional forms of improvisation, the opportunities for risk-taking and aesthetic exploration rise to a new level of uncertainty, as the reactions of the improviser simultaneously draw from and target both visual and aural modalities, such that the intentions toward each fuse together."

Asking ‘where are we now?’ this paper charts the choreographic process of four contemporary dance artists creating new work in relation to the theme of 21st Century identities. Case studies of work by UK and EU-based artists Avatâra Ayuso, Roberto Olivan, and Máté Mészáros & Nóra Horváth are examined in relation to historical influences, devising processes and directorial choices taken in an intensive rehearsal period with third year Bachelors of Dance Studies students at the University of Malta’s School of Performing Arts for an international tour in Malta and the UK.

Building on sociologist Rudi Laermans’ (2015) suggestion that contemporary dance is itself a collective activity characterized by works in which artistic cooperation leads to performance product, the study asks how intensive short-term artistic projects can illustrate small but noteworthy shifts in perceptions of selfhood for performers, choreographers and audience. It investigates how choreographing can become a strategic vehicle for discovering possible actions and interactions via  ‘management of possibilities’ (Foucault 2002: 341) within dancers’ identity, and as such becomes an exercise of power (Laermans 2008) to varying degrees.

The study invites reflection on three key elements: first, the approaches of these early and mid-career choreographers in relation to their histories and experiences working with established European artists Shobana Jeyasingh, Anne Teresa de Keersmaker and Wim Vandekeybus. Secondly, it analyses the impact of the working process in relation to the sense of identity experienced by the dancers as performers-in-training; and a third aspect addresses audience response to the works. Studio-based observation and notation within the creation period, semi-structured interviews with choreographers and dancers, and post-performance discussions offer opportunities for data collection.  In short, the paper seeks to critically illuminate what is ‘really beautiful’ about dancing for a key sample of people who continue to follow, perform and shape contemporary dance in the 21st Century.

Over the past four years I have developed The Porous Body, a teaching philosophy that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability in dance training by following four fundamental guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor and paradox. As my process deepened, I wondered: what would happen if I applied The Porous Body to my choreographic practice? How might this framework prove fruitful during a creative process? What kind of choreographic work would emerge from this experiment? This article is an artist’s reflection on an artistic experiment; it describes the first choreographic process to which I applied The Porous Body's guiding principles, and which led to the creation and performance of edged, a solo work exploring the porous edges between inner/outer, planned/unplanned, control/surrender, pleasure/struggle and terror/courage.

It has long been known that practicing musicians and dancers draw upon interdisciplinary relationships between sound and movement to inform their work and that many performance arts educators apply these relationships in working with aspiring composers, choreographers and performers. However, most material on the subject has been, to this point, relegated to single chapters in books and journal articles. Now, Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body brings together the diverse topics researchers and practitioners across the sector are exploring, and raises issues concerning the collaborative aspects of creating and performing new work.

Contributors:
Magnus Andersson, Robert Fullford, Jane Ginsborg, Osvaldo Glieca, Jeremy Peyton Jones, Joshua B. Mailman, Helen Julia Minors, Tatiana Oltean, Stephan Österjö, Sofia Paraskeva, Michael Picknett, Kelvin Thomson, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Mark Wraith, Marilyn Wyers.

In this short report, I share my experience of getting to know the choreographic practice of choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion using the Motion Bank digital annotation tool Piecemaker. My report narrates the process of coming from a place of not knowing their practice at all to a deeper understanding through listening to interviews and deciphering their scorebooks. I present some of the thought processes and steps I took using Piecemaker, and how this led me to explore different references (e.g. other composers, historical performance forms, etc.) they draw upon to create their choreographies. I then share the results of my study using the Motion Bank publishing tool MoSys.

Online Score: http://scores.motionbank.org/jbmf-revisited/

More than finding information, this collection also unveils and reveals information throughout multidimensional spaces. Needless to say that history is generally written by those who have conquered and won the allegiance of those who were vanquished, submitted. An yet, some of the latters would have been able to mark pages, spaces, times and memories with their own experiences, within their own bodies. Empirical histories intrinsically bear the global histories. In  the case of the Francophone Caribbean, the subjective histories (histoires chaudes) encompass the objective history (Histoire froide) of an alternative French narrative whose founding myths disqualify the mythical tales of an indivisive and unified nation. Behind the colonial loopholes, cross-fertilized, affirmative identities emerge. They highlight and nuance the representations of France, Frenchness and  Francophonie.
Through contemporary artistic practices can be discovered or uncovered the African and European inseminations which have constructed the Frenchized or French-ingrained identities displayed, deciphered and self-introduced in the volume. The artists’s portraits, patterns, and discourses reveal a process commonly shared among them : unmasking, diagnosing and collecting the imprints and traumas of colonialism in their own bodies and various inhabited spaces : native and explored abroad.
The concept of archive is  also  declensed in order to rehabilitate a memory and memories the amnesic francophone Caribbeans need recovering. An archive is as much the arts that chronicle the present as it is the filmographies produced on reels that chronicled the past. In other words, the uproar of uprootedness and brainwashing should find a path to a healing process, a reflection to a curing process against amnesia and deculturation.
The corporealities bear the semens of ancestral struggles and secular iinternalizations of movements and agencies against the oppressive machines and rituals of enslavements. Thus, can be valued here, and refined as well, the strength of the flesh and the poetics which transcended the Middle Passage. Hence, for instance, the Congo marks in the Caribbean dances that emerged apart, on distinct territories and estranged under different duress and bondage. ; or else the reparation attempts at finding a new choreographical, bodily syntax and writing new narratives.
Finally, intersectionally,  queerness is brought to the fore in a geopolitical conversation between postcolonial spaces : from undercovered to law-conquering stances, LGBTQTIA+ identities are explored and demonstrate the rainbowy spectrum of attitudes, some converging, others diverging from the matter-of-factedly integrative models and strategies. Implicitly, and meshed altogether, is the gender issue which without any doubt crosses all various chapters, although (obviously) intermingled with racial
In conclusion, what we found are an infra-conversation, an philosophical infra-trend, an infra-consciousness which out-mainstreams the dominant narrative.

Docudancing Griefscapes – choreographic strategies for embodying traumatic contexts in the trilogy Life & Death – is a self-reflexive artistic research project on developing choreography based on contextual background research and ethnographic fieldwork. From the viewpoint of the choreographer-researcher, I explored this strategy through constructing and embodying three contexts of traumatic grieving: (1) my private grieving, related to the sudden death of a close friend, (2) our mortality, related to facing our finitude, and (3) communal grieving, related to the aftermath of the Bosnian War (1992-1995), whose traumatic events ruptured a whole society’s existence. This process resulted in the performance trilogy Life & Death with the performances (1) A Song to Martin (2003), (2) A Rehearsal for Mortals (2005), and (3) An Unfinished Story (2006).  From this process emerged and evolved an artistic strategy I coined docudancing. The term refers to a choreographic approach to address socio-political contexts through drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and utilizing documentary material, both in the creative processes as well as in the performances. Out of this effort also arose the term griefscape, which is used here to denote the affective and entangled - though often ephemeral and invisible – impact that traumatic contexts of grieving can have in circumscribing our lives by being present through what is absent. I launched the concept of the kaleidoscopic optic to describe the project’s transdisciplinary research perspectives, which combine inputs from fields of ethnography and artistic research, choreography and somatics, and trauma and performance studies. This outlook led to the project’s choreosomatic approach to movements in which the body is viewed as a somatic subject rather than an aesthetical object, as well as situating the project’s expanded notion of what choreography and dancing entail. The focus of this enquiry is therefore on the moves created and reiterated through what is re-sited and recited, and what is practised and performed in this project. In line with this aesth/ethical thinking, I conclude by pointing to the politics of choreography, and the political responsibility that comes with a choreographic intervention.

ABSTRACT In this short report, I share my experience of getting to know the choreographic practice of choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion using the Motion Bank digital annotation tool Piecemaker. My report narrates the process of coming from a place of not knowing their practice at all to a deeper understanding through listening to interviews and deciphering their scorebooks. I present some of the thought processes and steps I took using Piecemaker, and how this led me to explore different references (e.g. other composers, historical performance forms, etc.) they draw upon to create their choreographies. I then share the results of my study using the Motion Bank publishing tool MoSys.

This conference explores the potential role of film and choreography in moving images to reimagine the architecture of failure, to help diverge from its habitual use and perception, and – if it is not too ambitious – to even save it from demolition.

In early 2014 we made a video trailer of some of our rehearsal footage to give a festival producer an idea of our choreographic work, especially our approach to physicality. A few weeks later, while viewing the trailer, which consisted of mostly unused physical movement material we had the thought, "How cool would it be to turn this trailer into our next piece?" Our motivation was to physically translate the four-minute digital video excerpt into an evening length, live dance performance. The term "physical translation" refers to a method in which a source material is examined and transformed into movement in order to discover essential qualities of both the original material and the bodies that try to convey its meaning. Specifically, our interest was in trying to accomplish phenomenon like hard cuts, fade ins/ fade outs and cross dissolves. Things that a computer program like iMovie does with a few clicks of a mouse, we wanted to do with our bodies. We were curious about finding solutions to basic spatial limitations of live performance in comparison to the possibilities provided by digital video editing. How can we fade ourselves out? How can I replace you in less than a second? How can one of us be here moving like this, and then immediately after be somewhere else doing something else? These are some of the questions that motivated our research and culminated in the creation of the work "doing things". The aim was to explore and compose a digital physicality, analyzing how bodily movement and organization might convey effects similar to video-editing.

"https://vimeo.com/fluxations/psfirstsoloside  FluxNOISations solo from an improvised duet performed with FluxNoisations and circuit-bent radio  (for front on view of the complete performance visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eBra9gd5QQ )  In this solo, Joshua B. Mailman: FluxNoisations (sounds of wood, metal, water, sandpaper, sticks, etc. and live computer graphics controlled through infrared camera motion-capture and sensor gloves)  All sounds and graphics are generated in the moment of performance.  The event includes improvised live computer graphics, a colorful spectacle projected on a large screen, controlled by spontaneous body- and hand-movements of Mailman, through his FluxNoisations interactive-dance system. Through this system, Mailman simultaneously generates and steers a stream of percussive-noise sound."