Choreographic Methods Research Articles

Crip Aesthetics and a Choreographic Method of Leakiness

Drawing attention to the affordances and challenges of disability dance and choreography, most notably aesthetic ideals which are antithetical to disability knowing, this research seeks to instigate a discussion on how we might radically envisage disability dance through a crip aesthetics. Theorizing my crip choreographic work Colored Shadow, I offer a method of leakiness as a tool to rupture hegemonic aesthetics of dance, which include compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, hierarchies of the stage, and inaccessibility. My proposal of a leaky choreographic method offers insight into the significance of crip theory and crip methodology as paths toward reconsidering and redefining aesthetics.

Revolt of the body in stillness

ABSTRACT The project choreographs revolt as performed in Butoh willful stillness. Stillness is a political intervention, which in its slow and sustained study reveals the functioning of in/visible economies of violence. Indeed, Butoh aesthetic of stillness, demands self-reflexivity that troubles voyeuristic passivity to create space for ethically facing the other in moments of violent cultural annihilations and suffering. Beyond underscoring the role of performance art in confronting the apathy of observing and consuming violence, the essay exemplifies Butoh as a choreographic method that performs the discomfort of seeing, thus, cuts across academic and aesthetic critiques of witnessing.

From Ephemeral to Digital: A Phenomenological Study of Screened and Live Contemporary Dance Performance

Employing the lens of screen dance theory and film phenomenology the aim of this essay is to explore the effect of including screened dance into live performance on the choreographic methods and on the experience of watching dance. The essay includes spoken word that guides the structure of the work as well as images of the work to create a written and visual narrative that combines artistic expression and analysis to explore the possibilities of including technology in contemporary dance making.

Virtual Reality and Choreographic Practice: The Potential for New Creative Methods

Virtual reality (VR) is becoming an increasingly intriguing space for dancers and choreographers. Choreographers may find new possibility emerging in using virtual reality to create movement and the WhoLoDancE: Whole-Body Interaction Learning for Dance Education project is developing tools to assist in this process. The interdisciplinary team which includes dancers, choreographers, educators, artists, coders, technologists and system architects have collaborated in engaging, discussing, analysing, testing and working with end-users to help with thinking about the issues that emerge in the creation of these tools.The paper sets out to explore the creative potential of VR in the context of WhoLoDancE and how this may offer new insights for the choreographer and dancer. We pay attention to the virtual environment, the virtual performance and the virtual dancer as some of the key components for equipping the choreographer to use in the creating process and to inform the dancing body. The cyclical process of live body to virtual, back to the dancing body as a choreographic device is an innovative way to approach practice. This approach may lead to new insights and innovations in choreographic methods that may extend beyond the project and ultimately take dance performance in a new direction.

A Study on Jérôm Bel’s Choreographic Method Using Narrative in Dancers Series

A Study on Jérôm Bel’s Choreographic Method Using Narrative in Dancers Series

Various Aspects of Cunningham’s choreographic methods and consistent characteristics of the performers

Various Aspects of Cunningham’s choreographic methods and consistent characteristics of the performers

What is Whose and Who is What?

What is Whose and Who is What? explores the relationship between dancers and choreographers during a collaborative process. It stretches the depth of the frequently asked questions regarding ownership and authorship beyond that of the finished product and applies them to the discarded material that isn't performed and didn't make it to stage. Liam Francis shares the choreographic method he is currently exploring that grants the performer permission to reclaim ownership and authorship of this discarded material. Francis has found this choreographic method, of reclaiming the choreographic leftovers of a collaborative process, can act as a tool in achieving a renewed sense of artistic autonomy.

Dancing Solutions to Conflict: Field-Tested Somatic Dance for Peace

ABSTRACTThe ability to creatively resolve conflict supports excellence in communication and fosters a positive classroom/studio climate. Despite the fact that school violence continues to be high, many schools fail to teach conflict management, social-emotional skills, or community building to all educators. This research-based article shares dance strategies that lead toward peaceable behavior using somatic explorations. Dance is used to identify problems from bullying to gun violence and to find solutions. The author’s Dynamic EmbodimentTM approach to somatic education provides skill-building for stress reduction, enhanced understanding of body cues, and opportunities for the practice of embodied socio-emotional development and conflict resolution. The approach includes a unique progression she has developed to enhance human tolerance, connection, and understanding of issues, feelings, cultures, and values when under duress. Dance improvisation and choreographic methods taught at NYC’s 92Y Dance Education Laboratory are shared.

How does Dance then do Politics with the Body?

Abstract This review of the book Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity (a compilation of lectures given by prominent theorists at an international symposium at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen in 2010) tries to outline correlations and differences between the heterogeneous essays in this anthology. The contributions discuss and re-think the political potential of modern and contemporary dance as well as of social movements and choreographies in the age of Post-Fordism. They mark out the disrupting effects of specific choreographic methods and performances and describe the transformative potentiality of certain movements in the current sociopolitical fabric so desperately absorbed by economic paradigms.

Innovative Dance-Technology Educational Practices within Senses Places

Abstract The project Senses Places has developed an experimental somatic-technological dance approach for dancing in mixed reality mediated through image, avatars and biodata. This paper discusses the interfaces and choreographic methods resulting from the art-technology collaborative process between the main authors, creating participatory performance environments and leading workshops that raise innovative challenges to crossover areas of curriculum design. The aim is to understand its effectiveness for creative trans-disciplinarity educational practices.

The ‘struggle’ of the subject: Productive ambiguity in Jonathan Burrows’ choreography

In this article notions of continuity and coherence are discussed in relation to Jonathan Burrows' choreographic work, with the aim to problematize their meanings in relation to contemporary artistic practices. Looking at intimate references and personal content of Burrows' work, I explore how representation and signification are constructed and operate in his dance, with a particular focus on three examples from his repertoire: Hymns (1988), The Stop Quartet (1996) and The Quiet Dance (2005). These works are emblematic of the productive contradictions inherent in Burrows' choreographic methods and of the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by the dialogue resulting from the interpersonal and interdisciplinary relationships around which the pieces are constructed. The analysis I propose is based on my observation of the dance material as well as on several personal conversations with Burrows, and draws on postmodern theory, post-structuralist discourse and intertextual methodologies of dance analysis.

Energy Geared to an Intensity High Enough to Melt Steel: Merce Cunningham, Movement, and Motion Capture

The paper is concerned with the relation between everyday human social conditioning and the specialized skills demanded by choreography. Exploring the choreographic methods of Merce Cunningham, the author shows how choreography requires an entrainment of the body that mirrors modes of corporeal socialization while deviating in significant ways from the conditioning normally received. Cunningham works with constraints that have little to do with social convention, but that remain historical insofar as they reflect the technological conditions of a particular era. In the paper, his methods are traced from the inception of chance operations to the employment of Life Forms and the software-aided creative process.

A Creative Process in Ethiopian-Israeli Dance: Eskesta Dance Theater and Beta Dance Troupe

Dancer, teacher, and choreographer Ruth Eshel has worked extensively with the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel (known as Falashas or Beta Israel), developing a creative process and contemporary choreographic approach to the traditional Ethiopian eskesta (shoulder dancing). Discussion of selected dances and different choreographic methods reveals a number of issues and responses arising in the course of this fifteen-year artistic journey. Questions and experiences uncovered through this exploration offer perspectives on cultural formation and preservation specific to the Beta Israel but also more broadly applicable to other immigrant groups, beyond the population and work discussed here.

Dance anthropology and the impact of 1930s Haiti on Katherine Dunham's scientific and artistic consciousness

Katherine Dunham (19092006) was one of the most critically and commercially successful dancers of the twentieth century. She established and ran the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the earliest self-supporting predominantly black dance company and one of the first modern dance troupes to achieve international success. She was also one of the first African Americans to conduct anthropological fieldwork, and the first anthropologist to explore the function of dance in rituals and community life. Her observations of dance rituals whilst working as a graduate researcher in 1930s Haiti played a formative role in her dance. Her choreographic method combined Caribbean cultural forms with ballet and modern dance practices and has had a profound but rarely acknowledged influence on twentieth century dance. This article examines Dunham's anthropological memoir, Island Possessed (1969), to explore the formative role that Haiti played on Dunham's scientific and artistic consciousness. It contends that Island Possessed articulates a highly reflexive engagement with ethnography, re-envisaging anthropological research as a space of intercultural exchange. It shows how the text sheds light on a lifelong project by Dunham to enact an artistic and cultural legitimization of Haiti by incorporating its ritual dance forms onto the concert dance stage, an endeavour that would ensure a significant Haitian influence over North American dance throughout the mid-twentieth century.

Improvisation in Process: “Post-Control” Choreography

Many contemporary choreographers use improvisation as a choreographic method. With cross-disciplinary historical antecedents, especially in post-World War II avant-garde art, improvisation remains a particularly relevant practice in today's cultural climate of political and economic uncertainty. This article describes an elastic dialogue of choreographic control in a rehearsal process that involves improvisation. A creative practice with such recurrent exchanges of control underscores a view that improvisation intimately affects choreographic choice, performance quality, and audience understanding.

Speak Out: Dancing into Problem-Based Learning

In recent years, Problem Based Learning (PBL) has been applied in medical and psychological areas of professional education. The PBL approach requires students to move past traditional choreographic methods toward making dances informed by real-world issues. In PBL, students work cooperatively to solve complex problems. Rather than being presented technical dance steps, they develop critical thinking abilities, acquire problem-solving skills, and communication dexterity. PBL can be effectively adapted for teaching high school and university dance classes, where problems are used to unlock the student voice and fuel the collaborative choreography process. This can be done in part by having groups meet in one dance studio with a roving teacher/facilitator and by using a problem as impetus for the creative process. This article describes a four-day PBL dance workshop and performance.

Ritual Design in the New Dance: Nijinsky's Choreographic Method

The first part of my article ('Ritual Design in the New Dance: Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps', Dance Research, Vol. III, No. 2, Summer 1985, pp. 35-45), endeavoured to share the shock of recognition I have experienced during my reconstruction of the choreography for this ballet. This part of the article examines some of Nijinsky's sources and suggests that his way of working with them evinced a method that could, I think, serve choreographers in the present and the future. Clues to the movement for any given section of the musical score of Sacre have accumulated gradually during my several years of research. And, as in the solving of any problem, one new fact perhaps a casual comment in an interview or a remark in some review from 1913 may suddenly make sense of many disparate details. When this synthesis occurs, I often find myself visualising a moment of the original Sacre onstage at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. These momentary images of Le Sacre du

Evidence for a Grammatical Structure in Javanese Dance: Examination of a Passage from Golek Lambangsari

There is evidence for the existence of some kind of grammatical structure in a passage from Golek Lambangsari, a Javanese classical court dance for women, composed by Sasmintamardawa of Jogjakarta, Java. In the passage under examination Sasmintamardawa used two different choreographic methods for manipulating the Javanese classical dance material: first, the more usual traditional, multipart variations with their connecting transitions; and second, very short, simple variations which seem not to have transitions between them. An analysis of the boundaries between the phrases in this passage reveals that the boundary conditions are different for each choreographic method, and further, for each level of the structure of the passage. The latter discovery indicates that the structure of the passage (no matter which choreographic method is considered) is different at each of three levels which I define in the boundary analysis—phrase, subphrase, and basic movement unit—and that there is some overall organizing grammatical principle causing this to be so. An explanation of Jogjanese classical female dance style phrase structure precedes the boundary analysis of the passage from Golek Lambangsari.