Embodying Musical Space

Abstract

The epoch-making dance reforms of the early twentieth century did not only lead to new dance techniques, styles, and movement concepts, but also to an intensive search for new dialogues between music/sound and dance/movement. These new interactions were notable for their reliance on pre-existing music that was usually not intended for dance. Analogous to the choreographers' search for new movements in new (sound) spaces, composers looked for a new physicality of sounds (musical gestures), as well as for new spaces inside and outside of these sounds. Following these mid-twentieth-century developments, choreographers have increasingly chosen “new music” for their creations—compositions beyond the classical repertoire. In my paper, I will explore the choreographic possibilities of “new (non-dance) music” by comparing two examples: Bill T. Jones' solo danced to Edgar Varèses' Ionisation and a solo created by Martin Schläpfer using György Ligeti's Ramification. These examples will serve as case studies to argue for my concept of “kinesthetic listening,” which can be applied to a more general approach to discussions of the embodiment of music. This concept includes not only the perspective of the choreographer and interpreter/dancer, but also the perception of the spectator/listener. As a precondition, music/sound is understood as movement: an audible but not visible, rather an imaginable/imaginary movement that can (but need not) interact with body movements. Body movements/dance, in turn, can interact with music according to different choreographic strategies. To analyze these choreomusical dialogues, a special combination of (and training in) listening to and watching movement is required—informed by models of analysis from musicology and dance studies as well as from phenomenology and cognitive sciences.