Contemporary dance choreography, arts and public practice

How might narrative and ephemeral acts of performance open spaces for redefining the civic within postcolonial cities, acknowledging without appropriating the deep rivers of story and memory held in indigenous ontologies and perceptions?  In acknowledging traumatic histories of place how can we avoid reinforcing binary categories like colonized and colonizer, victim and wrongdoer that tend to perpetuate fixed categories and feed into colonial guilt without offering alternative visions of the lived past and present future?  How can we actively remember the past whilst inserting ourselves into the present?

This paper explores the effect of the #MeToo movement in dance and, more specifically, how the re-emergence of female cho-reography in ballet can attribute certain consequences in changes of aesthetics in the art form and the normalisation of women's repertoire in major ballet companies to the movement. The paper takes a chronological look at the last three decades, focusing geographically in the United States and the United Kingdom in order to provide a framework that may explain the changes that have taken place in the sector in the last few years. Feminist and gender studies will provide the academic framework to analyse the press and media articles that seem to have played a major role in this resurgence of female choreography and leadership in the sector. Academic studies regarding the lack of parity in the sector at the upper tier of major companies and the historical neglect of women's contributions to the development of the art form will also be considered in the analysis of recent changes in the sector. Miranda Fricker's theory on  epistemic  injustice  will  also  provide  valuable  help  in  establishing  the possible factors that may have contributed to this historical neglect and  its  present  consequences.  The  analysis  will  be  mainly  qualitative  through the internal and external analysis of the collected sources.

Die Diskussion um Abstraktion und Körper ist auf engste mit dem Medium Schrift verbunden und subsumiert wesentliche Aspekte der Schriftphilosophie, insbesondere die Frage nach der Materialität von Schriftzeichen und der Körperlichkeit ihrer Hervorbringung. Der Text wirft einen Rückblick auf die historische Gewordenheit der Verschränkung von Schrift und Abstraktion samt ihrer Rolle als Negativfolie einer phonozentrischen Konkretionsidolatrie. Auf der Suche nach Alternativen zu der harten Dichotomie von Schrift und Konkretion fällt der Blick auf Tanz und Choreographie als Inszenierungen einer écriture corporelle. Am Beispiel von Trisha Browns 'Locus' (1975), einem der einflussreichsten Stücke des Postmodern Dance, stellen sich die Fragen: Mit welcher Taktik schreibt sich hier Tanzen in den Diskurs der Schrift ein? Wie verändert eine solche Einschreibung das Verhältnis von Konkretion und Körperlichkeit? Und: Warum provoziert gerade die Korporealität eines Schrifttanzes dessen Wahrnehmung als abstraktes Ornament?

The text attempts to analyse the nature of the relationship between popular culture and contemporary dance, both of which are an inherent part of the turmoil of the modern social revolution, and which have remained in symbiosis since their earliest days. The first part of the article presents examples of early Modernist practices, where popular culture was a natural component (as it were) of new strands of contemporary dance; on the other hand, some modern dance artists aspired to make theirs into a mass art. Section two portrays artists who deliberately include popular culture inspirations into their style, referencing the carnivalesque origins of dance practice. A further part takes an analytical, meta-discursive approach to the theme of popular culture as a feature in the critique of contemporary society – an approach characteristic of the youngest generation of choreographers. A summary of the above analyses presents modern dance as at once restoring culture’s critical and emancipatory potential – and struggling in vain to entirely avoid the danger of objectifying the body.

Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms—such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components—that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved.

This is an introduction to a provocative volume that revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.

The book's TOC:

Series Editor's Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Object—Event—Performance
Hanna Hölling

Introducing Fluxus with Tools
Hanna B. Higgins

Exhausting Conservation: Object, Event, Performance in Franz Erhard Walther’s Werkstücke
Hanna B. Hölling

Video Art’s Past and Present “Future Tense:” The Case of Nam June Paik’s Satellite Works
Gregory Zinman

Resurrecting Hannah Wilke’s Homage to a Large Red Lipstick
Andrea Gyorody

Mutable and Durable: The Performance Score after 1960
Alison D’Amato

Sometimes An Onion: Simone Forti and the Choreographic Logic of Objects and Institutions
Megan Metcalf

Views of Nature: Preserving Land (Art) with Collective Intent
Rebecca Uchill

Enlivened Pieces: Richard Tuttle at the Whitney Museum of American Art 1975
Susanne Neubauer

The Cheapness of Writing Paper, and Code: Materiality, Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art
Beryl Graham

The Propensity toward Openness: Bloch as Object, Event, and Performance
Johannes M. Hedinger and Hanna B. Hölling

Contributors

Index

This article proposes a choreographic model for Dance/Movement Therapy as it relates to the transformation of psychological material
through the medium of dance choreography and performance. The choreotherapeutic model uses Dance/Movement Therapy and general psychotherapy
techniques to support clients to work with their psychological material, externalise it into dance choreography, make meaning of and transform the material, and integrate it through performance. Creating and performing dances in the context of a therapeutic goal will likely facilitate clients to understand their relationship to themselves and others, gain insight into their own unique process of expression, learn their associations with being seen, and utilise the witness function of an audience (Caldwell, 1996; Levy, 1988; Pallaro, 2007). This writer proposes that the creative
process of dance choreography and performance brings greater organisation and clarification to the experience of internal states.

Trisha Brown’s early choreographic work deals intrinsically with the relationship between dance and urban space. Performed on rooftops, park benches or exterior house walls, some of her most famous pieces of Postmodern Dance investigate how choreography can interact with the topography of a city. Dance here does not merely react to the city as a stage, but rather creates and transforms its own surrounding space by leaving ephemeral inscriptions within the network of urban structures.
But how does a dance piece performed outside the walls of a theatre or gymnasium read and even change the social structure of a city? To which ways of urban cartography – such as street maps and traffic signs – can choreography refer by copying systems of city-communication and developing them into an undecipherable form of body calligraphy? And finally: when dancing is far more than an ornamental addition to an urban landscape, to what extent can it be described as a form of architecture in itself?
I will address these questions in regard to Trisha Brown’s „Roof and Fire Piece” originally performed on rooftops in SoHo in 1973 and recreated on the High-Line in Chelsea in 2011. By focusing in particular on the figuration and de-figuration of the bodily shapes of the dancers – who are dressed in scarlet-red costumes – I will argue that their movements, blended with an urban topography, create a synesthetic and kinesthetic vision of dance as an embodied form of fluid architecture and semaphore-like writing in the city.

L'elaborato si pone l'obiettivo di analizzare l'attività del coreografo toscano Virgilio Sieni, andando a ragionare principalmente sulla ricerca dello stesso intorno alla danza comunitaria. In secondo luogo, essa raffronta tale ricerca con l'evento "Thauma, atlante del gesto" svoltosi presso Matera nel 2019.

André Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of 'performance' in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five 'singularities' in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity. Exploring the works of Mette Ingvartsen, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jérôme Bel and others, Lepecki uses his concept of 'singularity'—the resistance of categorization and aesthetic identification—to examine the function of dance and performance in political and artistic debate. -- Available June 28, 2016. Published by Routledge.

Lisans öğrenciliği yıllarımda yazdığım bu makaleyi; şu anda değerlendirdiğimde birçok hatalı bilgi ve görüşüm olduğunu görmekteyim. Makaleme ulaşan değerli öğrenci ve araştırmacıların da; bu görüşümü göz önünde bulundurarak kendisini bir kaynak olarak görmemeleri konusunda uyarma gerekliliğine inanıyorum. İlginize teşekkür ediyorum. (29.01.2016)

Interview with Mario Kramer, curator of the exhibition 'The Fact of Matter Choreographic objects by William Forsythe', about the connections between dance and visual arts, about kinetic knowledge and observer's physical involvement in the exhibition.

Inhaltsangabe: Diese, im Zuge eines PhD stattfindende Forschungsarbeit, untersucht am Beispiel von Tanzperformances Entwürfe non-hierarchischer Formen künstlerischer Zusammenarbeit. Soziologische Methoden, wie die qualitative Netzwerkanalyse und die Sozialontologie des Philosophen Jean-Luc Nancy aufeinander beziehend, sollen subjektivistische und objektivistische Perspektiven ineinander verschränkt werden: In diesem Beitrag werden Methoden, welche der Soziologe Pierre Bourdieu im Zuge seiner Forschungen entwickelte, auf Anschlussstellen an Nancys Theoriegebäude geprüft: Ziel ist, ein Wahrnehmungsraster zu bilden, welches zwischen Theorie und Praxis vermittelt, um dieses auf Formen künstlerischer Zusammenarbeit anzuwenden.

This thesis entitled Dance, Compose, Deconstruct, De-Compose is a practice-based research project in the field of Dance Studies. The notion of de-composition as it is explored in my practical work, 'Piece pieced in pieces', critiques the method of composition as it is outlined in the New South Wales, Board of Studies, Dance Stage 6 Syllabus. Dance, as it is framed in this syllabus, acts as a medium through which a choreographer represents a ‘concept/intent’ (NSW Board of Studies 2009, p.25). A successful work is therefore deemed as such when the elements of composition signify the choreographer’s intentions. As I depart from an essentially early 20th Century ‘modernist’ foundation in dance making, I will demonstrate how my understanding of de-composition falls into the philosophical paradigm of Neo-Dadaism. In doing so, I will prescribe a set of de-compositional strategies which will challenge the production and form of choreography, as well as the choreographer’s sense of authorship in a dance work.

Choreographer Xavier Le Roy questions the conventional role of art institutions, and the notion of linear, historical representations that they are in charge of preserving. Retrospective brings these questions into focus, confronting the ideological trappings of the museum and employing the for-mat of the retrospective as a starting point to create something new. The product is something in between an exhibition and a theater performance; an inherently human work, in which the materials are social interactions themselves.

La designazione di isolato è qui assunta nel suo doppio significato: in termini epistemici, archeologici e temporali, oppure architettonici e spaziali. Come aggettivo, rimanda all’essere appartato, separato da un gruppo e da un insieme, dunque nel tempo della solitudine e della esclusione dalla frequentazione, a contraggenio di un tempo invece collettivo. Come sostantivo si riferisce, piuttosto, a un edificio o gruppo di edifici circondati intorno da strade, dunque secondo un’idea di spazio iscritto dal suo circostante. L’idea di danzare isolati allude a una particolare prassi della frequentazione dell’alterità, attraverso la coreografia, in termini temporali (l’isolamento e la singolarità ma rispetto a un gruppo) e insieme spaziali (la relazione ai margini con ciò che è remoto). Non si tratta soltanto di una ricercata modalità compositiva ma di un paradigma interpretativo, un piano di lettura dell’azione. E si inscrive a partire dall’idea di affetto come una dinamica del desiderio all’interno di un sistema/arcipelago capace di manipolare significato e relazione e generare intensità. Il saggio documenta alcune strategie di occupazione dello spazio performativo attraverso modalità coreografiche “per isolati” — e che si affermano forse proprio come forme culturali dell’arcipelago — in alcune recenti performance contemporanee, quali la ‘messa in campo’ di Agorà Tutti di Virgilio Sieni (2013), lo studio sulla giocoleria UNTITLED_I will be there when you die di Alessandro Sciarroni (2013), la decostruzione della mente coloniale nelle incursioni geografiche e/o cartografiche di Michele Di Stefano in Il giro del mondo in 80 giorni per MK (2011) e, più recentemente, in Upper East Side per Aterballetto (2014).

The notion of “building blocks”, here, has a double meaning. On the one hand, it is conceived in epistemic, archaeological, and temporal terms; on the other hand, in architectural and spatial ones. As an adjective, it indicates something set apart, separated from a group or a set of elements, therefore referring to the time of solitude and exclusion from social engagement, in contrast with the time of collectivity. As a noun, it relates to a building or a group of buildings surrounded by streets, conveying the idea of an inscribed space. Dancing as blocks alludes to a particular praxis of engagement with alterity through choreography, both in temporal terms (isolation and singularity in relation to a group) and in spatial terms (the relationship at the margins with the remote). It is not just about a strategy of composition, but a hermeneutic paradigm, a method to read the action. Moreover, affect intervenes in this procedure as a dynamic of desire that, within an archipelago-system, determines meaning, relationships, and generates intensity. The essay aims to draw out how the building blocks choreographic strategy can shape and occupy the performative space. This strategy seems to affirm itself as cultural form of the archipelago in some recent contemporary performances: staging the campo in Agorà Tutti by Virgilio Sieni (2013); Alessandro Sciarroni’s work on juggling UNTITLED_I will be there when you die (2013); the deconstruction of the colonialist structure through geographic and/or cartographic actions by Michele Di Stefano in Il giro del mondo in 80 giorni for MK (2011), and in Upper East Side for Aterballetto (2014).

Poetics can be distinguished from other kinds of thought exercised in art by virtue of its capacity to pose a curious question: " What is the art I would like to see before I can see it? " To muse on a poetical principle, for instance, how to be with empty hands in a performance, is different from creation by posing (or choreographing) a problem or devising a technical procedure within a received theoretical framework. While problems are posed in order to be resolved in composition, and procedures applied to technically shape a process, poetical principles direct the thought of creation toward imagination into futurity often leading to a poetic usage of language. This text will explore elements of contemporary performance poetics in which imagination gains ground. Rather than a faculty of forming images from perception into memory, imagination here accounts for the ability to think of something not presently perceived, for thoughts without experiential content. It involves feigning, as in Spinoza's sense of knowingly entertaining fictions. I will discuss these poetical principles in a close reading of a few performances. 1 A F TER CHOREOGR A PHING PROBLEMS… In 2015, I published a book in which I posited a kind of thought that arises from, and gives rise to, problems, a problematic and discordant, and not harmonious relationship between ideas and forms of sensibility. 2 In a word, such performance work was considered " difficult, " and many other misnomers were tossed around, like conceptual dance and the importance of " kawr-ee-og-ruh-fee. " 3 What differentiated the experimental segment of European dance from the rest of the performance production in that period, roughly between 1994 and 2010, was the expression of how things came into being, how bodies, movement and time were thought and composed on the same plane of practice, debunking the dominant logic of representation. They were expressed through posing problems within making, performing and attending performance—a method affordable when uncertainty, makers and attenders getting lost or being destabilized or persisting in negativity was also tenable. Nowadays another image of thought prevails: images, words and procedures must respond to a growing expectation of managing an audience's experience. Performances are pressed to provide desirable experiences or deliver political or moral messages in a facile manner. The manner of speaking in applications or post-hoc reports for subsidy bleeds into program notes and this idiom is calibrated by instrumental reason. Reducing language to a principle of exchange forces a self-conscious style: spectator, you are supposed to read what you are going to get. And artists, like other thriving individuals, agree to self-perform, and over-perform, which means comply with the requisite of producing evidence, a preview of the experience (and value) their art promises to provide. The upshot is that audiences arrive knowing what they are about to have for an hour and a half. We are locked into a presen-tist predicament of temporality: not only is only the present real, but the instant must also

La danza e la coreografia sono ormai parti imprescindibili dell'immaginazione contemporanea, sia per quanto riguarda in generale le arti, sia per quanto riguarda più precisamente i saperi. Questo libro analizza una costellazione di performance per mostrare, e fare spazio a, una differente genealogia di movimento che si è tradotta in una pratica estetica di resistenza politica nella danza europea contemporanea. Lungi dal rivendicare inappropriate ragioni autoriali, qui lo stare fermi è una forza del pensiero intuitivo antitetica alla logica dell'introspezione. È una strategia di sparizione capace di mettere in crisi la dittatura del tempo cronologico. L'immobilità e l'inerzia sono scelte di (resistenza al) movimento informate di una precisa tecnica posturale, ma riluttanti a un immediato tornaconto di leggibilità. Sono scelte che rigettano l'esibizione di una competenza e di uno specialismo, ma che privilegiano il coinvolgimento emotivo e non-pianificato. Sono dunque fonti affidabili di autonomia politica, ossia di resilienza nei confronti delle forze di omogeneizzazione, uniformazione, standardizzazione e semplificazione adottate dalle più recenti politiche neoliberali. Questo libro parla della giustizia delle vertebre contro l'ossessione muscolare dell'esibizione della forza, dei requisiti e delle qualifiche. Ma anche contro il feticismo della profondità e dell'interiorità normatrice.

This performing arts master thesis is written for documenting the conceptual background, methodology and production process of the dance performance titled: “Liquid Politics”. The subject of this thesis is “approximation of performance and protest in context of liquidity”. The literature review has been carried out in order to
find out clues of contemporary dance/performances that approach what is political, and also protests that approach performativity in ‘liquid modern times’. In this thesis, the
concept of “liquidity”, defined by Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” conceptualization, suggests a different viscosity, speed and transformation than the constant fixed background of the past.
In the creative process, the research question was: “is it possible to create a dance performance, in accordance with current changes of the political agenda with the use of stand-up performdance method?” “Liquid Politics” was inspired by June 2013’s ‘Gezi Park Social Movement’. “Liquid Politics” has been realized as a public space performance using the method of ‘stand-up performdance’, which is considered to be an
example of political contemporary dance performance in Turkey. The methodology followed for this thesis includes participatory observation, performance creation studies and documentation of the performing process.

In her article "Towards a Framework of a Semiotics of Dance" Nicoleta Popa Blanariu constructs a framework of based on de Saussure's, Peirce's, and Barthes's thought. She applies Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of semiosis defined as a cultural system of conventions. In dance this occurs when choreographic signs are encoded, for example in magic, ritual, or religious expressions of movement. Further, Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of the role of "intelligent consciousness" is crucial for the engendering of signification and thus to dance. In dance, the choreographer "interprets" the world and by means of selection and interpretation, the choreographic sign reveals its object and this process is related to abstraction. In semiosis dance involves a process of "culturalization" (Barthes), whereby codes of dance represent the spontaneity of "natural" of movements and feelings within a repeatable system of expression. Last but not least, Edmund Husserl's notion that dance belongs to the domain of "pre-reflexivity" of signal and entails symbolic qualities derived from its embedding of cultural codes is employed by Popa Blanariu in her building a framework of the semiotics of dance.

Web services are playing dominant role on Internet for e-business. The compositions of these services are used to meet business objectives. The web service choreography describes the external observable behavior of these compositions. Many compositions may available for same functionality. These compositions cannot be distinguished on the basis of functional properties. This Quality of services (QoS) may help the user to select web services and to analyze composition of the web services. Web service choreography is going to dictate implementation of workflow. This workflow consists of several tasks. Each task is implemented by web services. These services are hosted in large numbers by different service providers on different service clusters. The mapping of service and task is difficult issue in run time environment. The interoperability between services is also a great problem. The selection of services is very big issue. In this paper we have proposed a bio-inspired selection algorithm based on dominant role and proposed a discovery infrastructure. We have also used the client behavior to improve the failure of the composition of the service. INDEX TERMS

Volume parte del Progetto RIC.CI - Reconstruction Italian Contemporary Choreography, basato sulle ricostruzioni degli spettacoli più significativi della coreografia italiana degli anni ’80 e ’90. Il progetto è diretto da Marinella Guatterini.
Il contributo in questione è la traduzione in italiano di un articolo in francese pubblicato su ETC MEDIA n. 101, pp. 48-63, Inverno 2014.

My paper presents findings from an action research project focussing on a series of creative dance workshops. The key question of this research is; How may the collaborative choreographic process effect the participant’s sense of identity as dancer? Theoretical issues that are explored include a philosophical examination of cognition during the choreographic process as is related to educational value and also how the process of choreography itself, is research. Subtexts reflect on how this specific action research process may indirectly inform issues of sustainability of dance research, of dance education and of dance as a theatre art.

Tra il 25 e il 26 novembre del 1945, la poetessa russa Anna Achmàtova riceve in visita, nel suo appartamento di Fontannij Dom a Leningrado, lo scrittore di origine russa, allora diplomatico inglese, Isaiah Berlin. Restano insieme fino all’aurora, forse si amano, di certo si comprendono, e poiché il desiderio combatte sempre una lotta invisibile contro il tempo, la cosa non passò sotto silenzio. Sùbito controllata dal Kgb e censurata pubblicamente da Ždanov, iniziano per Achmàtova anni di sofferenza e privazioni. Il ricordo posteriore della notte con Berlin, che nei suoi versi chiamerà l’«Ospite dal futuro», assume le linee di un incontro mistico che avviene sulle note di una Ciaccona di J. S. Bach. La musica di Bach è invocata contro il terrore politico della contrapposizione ideologica e culturale: il programma di lì a pochissimo della guerra fredda. Nel segno della musica di Bach è propiziato l’incontro con l’Altro, assicurato il dialogo con l’ospite e raccolto il dono del futuro.
In quegli stessi anni, dall’altra sponda dell’Occidente, a partire dal 27 dicembre 1942 la danzatrice e coreografa americana Doris Humphrey presenta un all-Bach Program allo Studio Theater di New York City, da cui seguì una vera e propria querelle con il critico del «New York Times», John Martin, sulla legittimità dell’uso di certe forme della musica del passato per concerti di danza moderna. Il disaccordo tra Humphrey e Martin investe direttamente l’idea che ciò che viene considerato, tra le opere del passato, un classico, possa dare, attraverso le forme del nuovo, nuovi significati alle epoche più diverse. Un disaccordo anche politico, nell’idea che il presente possa aver bisogno di una memoria capace di mostrare, perfino nella sua esemplarità formale, che la coreografia secondo Humphrey può e deve finalmente interpretare, una via di resistenza alla barbarie.
Così come per Achmàtova, l’inedita consapevolezza della composizione coreografica di Humphrey, nell’ospitalità per entrambe della musica di Bach, si rinnova l’idea del futuro come dono contro il gelo del presente.

The Education Departments of Tate Modern and Goldsmiths College collaborated with a group of teachers to find out what they understood by the term ‘contemporary art’ and to discover the conditions that enable contemporary art practices in the classroom. We explored questions with eleven teachers, from both primary and secondary schools, during the Autumn of 2004. Although the cultural/ethnic context of the schools the teachers worked within was diverse, they shared a commitment to working with contemporary art in the classroom and exploring new pedagogies in this field. Their engagement with contemporary art and their revealing and compelling experiences are documented, contextualized and summarized. Samples of the
discussions form the substance of this article. This is preceded by an analysis of the success of socially-orientated contemporary art in the wider global context and its contrast with the omission of these practices in many schools. Conclusions have been tentatively drawn about how the curriculum may be better served by the use of
contemporary art, as well as the means by which new learning methods may be facilitated.