Choreographic Process Research Articles

Gadamerian Hermeneutics in An Artistic Process of Retno Maruti And Bulantrisna Djelantik’s Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang

<p class="Default">The research is to investigate the existence of <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang</em>,<em> </em>as a dance piece, which its creation based to reinterpretation towards tradition and indigenous wisdom. The dance brings Indonesian classical idioms and mythological sphere into a dynamic contemporary. The dance attempts to avoid either the clichés or<em> </em>destructive forms. It is imperatively seeking the ontology of <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang </em>through investigating hermeneutical aspects in the process of creating, conceptual sphere, and spectacle representation. The juxtaposition, in which the dance is presented, is a unique way to accommodate the process of inter-subjective understanding respectively amongst choreographers, aesthetical values of Java and Bali, the myth of <em>Calonarang</em>, and today’s reality.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p class="Default">A philosophical qualitative is the foreground to investigate a new understanding about artworks through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Such perspective provides the interwoven understanding towards contemporary (of art-works), the critique of aesthetics, revitalizing the tradition, and dialogical pattern inside the effort of the fusion of horizons. Gadamerian hermeneutics is confidentially constructed through identifying choreographic concept and aesthetic codes from the analysis of dance structure and representation. <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang</em> achieves its innovative, artistic ontological existence and its spiritual field, in the middle of Indonesian contemporary society. Its concept assertively suggests Indonesian choreography to accommodate contemporary innovation, while it also conveys its cultural identity into broader implementation of multicultural state.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p>Keywords : Gadamerian hermeneutics; choreographic process; dialogical sphere; The <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang.</em></p>

Experiencing, and being experienced as, learning disabled choreographers in the West of Ireland

ABSTRACTSpeckled Egg Dance was established in Galway, Ireland, in 2013, to facilitate opportunities for learning disabled dance artists to develop semi-professional dance skills and independent choreographic practice. The company aims to contest normative perceptions of learning disabled dance ability, and to make learning disabled dance aesthetics visible through public performance. Referencing the dancers’ own descriptions of their choreographic process, this discussion of two of the company’s recent projects, ‘The Barna Pier Solos’ and ‘Loop Head: Dreams of My Life’ explores landscapes of the West of Ireland, and the dancers’ own bodies, as sites of their agency as learning disabled artists.

The Choreographer’s View

AbstractIn 2016, I published a book in Danish ‘Koreografens blik – En performativ koreografisk metode til skabelse af en interkulturel forestilling’. This article is a short presentation of this book. The book qualifies the choreographer’s view, that is, it examines and articulates the choreographic process from idea to product. Because of my dual role as choreographer and scholar, my analysis takes practice-based research and artistic research as its points of departure. On the basis of courtship dances, I have created an intercultural dance performance entitled ‘Sommerfuglen’ (‘The Butterfly’). The performers are dancers and musicians from Tanzania, Vietnam and Denmark. Courtship dances have a ritual status in all three cultures. I analyse the translocal process of the development of an intercultural dance performance in which local Tanzanian courtship dance features are analysed. The focal point of the translocal analysis are artistic and social practices that support the dance performance. What changes occur from translocal practice and/or dialogue? How can they be used in a global dialogue? The theories and methods used to analyse performative choreographic practice have their origins in performative anthropology, performance studies and theories of performativity.

Animate Shadows: Exploring synaesthesia and kinesthesia within digitised dance

This paper will consider the dynamic temporality of interactive digitised dance processes, as articulated through glitch artist Antonio Roberts and Butoh dancer Rachel Sweeney’s on-going digital choreographic collaboration. The paper examines some of the physiological processes that occur when live and digitised bodies inform each other through auto-generated choreography, activating a kind of affective engagement with an audience through immersivity. Auto-generated choreography can be defined here as the various modes of dance composition and production. These modes operate in the merger between live movement composition, re-articulation of live movement via recorded and projected movements of the dancer’s body, and also those emergent digitised dancing figures that result as a bi-product of working with digital glitch programming. The latter occurrs as non-determinate and non sequential movement. The themes put forward here are those that have emerged, circulated and dispersed within this digital choreographic process and harbor the micro sensitivities that exist within controlled and non controlled performance environments. Drawing from a phenomenological approach, this paper will reflect on critical writings surrounding the role of visuality and spectator empathy as put forward respectively by writer Brian Massumi and choreographer William Forsythe. This approach spurns a debate about how the act of calibrating live and digitised movement within auto-generated choreography presents Sweeney and Robert’s performance-making strategies as an active metaphor for embodying empathetic spectator processes. In particular, Sweeney’s own movement practice, which is fostered on Butoh training and performance, will be given consideration from three key terms: synaesthesia, multiplicity and dispersal. The writing thus offers an inquiry into the relationship between Butoh and glitch, underpinned by an interrogation of the role of proximity, perception and proprioception within integrated digital dance.

Looking at different cultural contexts in the contemporary dance of ArtsCross/Danscross

Abstract The ArtsCross/Danscross project aimed to build and strengthen artistic dialogue and interaction, understanding and communication among those from different cultural backgrounds. From observing and discussing nine choreographic processes, we discovered a problem: differences in the understanding of the term ‘contemporary dance’. This article discusses choreographic works from ArtsCross/Danscross, starting with views on and comparisons of Chinese and western contemporary dance. The article analyses the reasons for differences in the awareness of contemporary dance of people from different cultural backgrounds and thereby triggers reflections on the prospects for the development of dance in contemporary China.

Whispering secrets

Abstract These artist-reflections aim to give an insight into somatic-informed arts practices as acts of reconciliation and personal transformation in a post-World War II Europe. The author worked for more than twenty years in collaboration with writer and theatre director Julia Pascal, creating works that in her words aimed ‘to challenge the idea that theatre cannot explore the Holocaust imaginatively and without exploitation, sensation or sentimentality’. This collaboration culminated in a site-responsive choreographic performance The Secret Listeners that the author directed in 2012 using somatic-informed choreographic processes to construct an experiential journey designed as a guided tour for all participants. The article draws on the author’s artistic practice, including collaborative work with Pascal Theatre Company, and the author’s extended period of study with Holocaust survivor choreographer Hilde Holger (1905–2001). This work is contextualized through micro-narratives of the author’s family history.

The autoethnographic act of choreography: considering the creative process of storytelling with and on the performative dancing body and the use of Verbatim Theatre methods

This article, which takes on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion of the body as the prime means of knowing the world, starts with the understanding that we have a body, are a body and become a body. These are key concepts for those, like me, who tell stories with the body – the act of choreography. Arguing for the notion of the embodied ‘I’ and interrogating the politics of autoethnography (see, for example, Holman Jones 2005), this article offers an encounter with my own process of conceptualising and choreographing days like these (2015). Working with Verbatim Theatre (also called documentary theatre) methodologies I looked at the politics of memory and history, for a potential crossover between this theatremaking method and the choreographic process. The way I choreograph is essentially ‘verbatim’ in that I am constantly asking dancers to bring their own life experience – through their bodies – into the dance theatre we create. In looking at days like these (2015) I offer a critical analysis of my own choreography (beyond the encounter and analysis of the process of making). This is done as a feminist act of responding to the constructions and play of knowledge and power within and on the moving, dancing body: both my own body and those of the six dancers with whom I collaborated.

Moving Collaborations: A Critical Inquiry Into Designing Creative Interactive Systems for Choreography

The use of technology in choreographic process has been encumbered by the richness of data in live human movement and the constraints of computation. While technology is often considered a tool in choreographic process, with developments it can participate as a collaborator by transforming and elici

Alive or dead? Face to face with contemporary dance

Abstract At a time when artists are questioning twenty-first-century dance for its contemporary-ness, this writing exposes a tension that plays across differing choreographic processes – a tension that suggests a widening rift between letting go into collaborative uncertainty and the creation of single authored productions of spectacle. I suggest that a move away from spectacle in the United Kingdom is exacerbated by various wider themes such as practice as research, somatics, digital technology and neo-liberalism, all of which have deeply affected artists’ performance processes. Particular emphasis is given to how shifts in institutionally driven dance training and education are affecting performance, and the writing draws attention to what artists might have in common across the divide – a passionate engagement with how we communicate what we do with others.

Interfering with the lived field of dance pedagogy from organizational and leadership studies perspectives–an explorative intervention with performing and teaching dance artists

One Saturday, in November in 2014, a researcher made an explorative intervention with 22 professional performing and teaching dance artists on the independent dance field in Norway. Through the three-hour-long intervention, the researcher and participants dived into questions about choreographic processes and dance pedagogy in contemporary times. The intervention interfered with the dance artists’ deep, embodied experiences of leadership traditions on the dance field and provoked to new ‘sayables’. In this article, we make these discussable through organizational and leadership theory. In our analysis, we pivot around the following research questions: (a) How can an explorative intervention about dance pedagogy and choreographic processes in contemporary times provoke and make visible and discussable central aspects of dance and dance education? (b) How can dialog with theory from organizational and leadership studies challenge and enrich the perspectives on dance pedagogy and choreographic processes brought to the forefront in the intervention?

Navigating control and illusion: functional interactivity versus ‘faux-interactivity’ in transmedia dance performance

ABSTRACTInteractivity – a networked loop in which a performer’s live data feeds a digital system – can bridge the divide between live performance and digital entities in transmedia dance performances. In the ‘entanglement scene’ of Australian Dance Theatre’s Multiverse (2014), choreographer Garry Stewart and the creative coders and animators at the Deakin Motion.Lab utilise ‘faux-interactivity’, or a perceived relationship between the dancers and digital entities that exists only from the perspective of the audience. The spectre of ‘faux-interactivity’ challenges the spontaneity in live, embodied performance art because it both integrates live performance with prerendered digital content and offers a potential structure for a shared, dispersed creative and choreographic process across numerous and shared artistic and technological platforms. This paper investigates the concept of ‘faux-interactivity’, suggesting that its use can be a catalyst for moving beyond the limitations and values of ‘real’, or functional interactive systems within a theatrical context, and positing that definitions of ‘interactivity’ might be further expanded to accommodate the shifting timelines inherent in the disparate creative processes of human performance and coding.

Should You Watch Dance Documentaries? Only if you want to be inspired and informed about the dance world

Should you watch dance documentaries? Only if you want to be inspired and informed about the dance world As you graze through the good, the bad, and the ugly dance clips on YouTube, consider the benefits of watching Paul Taylor’s company in Dancemaker—it’s one of the ways you find out about the past and your possible future by Savannah Reach Should dance documentaries be required for dance majors to watch? Some students say that documentaries are useful in learning about choreographers and leading figures in the dance field. Others think they are boring and a waste of time when there are numerous “popular” choreographers available on YouTube. After considering it, I strongly believe that documentaries should be required for dance majors to watch. In particular, I am advocating for Dancemaker, which is a tribute to Paul Taylor. One of the prominent artists of the 20 th and 21 st Centuries, Taylor has choreographed over 140 dances and helped shape the art of modern dance in America. Taylor is an important figure in the dance world, and Dancemaker gives a unique insight into his significance. Documentaries can be long and students might not understand how they relate to what they want to do in the future. They would rather spend hours on YouTube watching the coolest competition kids or the newest tricks to achieve over-splits. These students struggle to find the reasons documentaries are required in class and lack motivation to watch them. What they don’t understand is that dance documentaries can provide a deeper understanding of choreographers, such as Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, and Pina Bausch. By watching their choreography, students can learn what has been successful in the past and compare it to their own work. Even though YouTube provides a vast amount of options for the dance student, the quality of videos on YouTube is often bad, with amateurs posting as many dance videos as professionals. It can take hours searching through mediocre dancing to find an inspirational video. Plus, there are annoying ads on YouTube and multiple distractions of other videos popping up on the side. Documentaries provide a well-developed story with potential to catch the eye of aspiring professional dancers for long enough to follow the narrative arc. It creates an outlet for students to understand another dance culture, follow a dance company on tour, or see a dance style they have never heard of before. These perspectives are important for the dancers to become well-rounded individuals in the art of dance so they can not only dance, but can also have meaningful, intelligent conversations about their field. For serious dancers, Dancemaker shows what makes Paul Taylor the recipient of nearly every honor and award given to artists in the United States. The details are shown throughout the documentary, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. If students are interested in creating dance for film, this documentary is a perfect source to learn about techniques such as transitions, camera angles, and interview methods. The documentary also gives students insight on what is required to be in a dance company or to run one. It follows rehearsals, traveling on tour, auditions, and the choreographic process. Taylor’s money management team is also filmed to give an idea of the funding fluctuations that affect dance productions and salaries.

Stillness, breath and the spine - Dance performance enhancement catalysed by the interplay between 3D motion capture technology in a collaborative improvisational choreographic process

We propose that Motion Capture (MoCap) in dance is part of, but distinct from, the traditional use of film or video as an archival and indexical instrument. Furthermore in the move from the recording of framed and temporally consistent slices of linear film or video ‘footage’ to the collection of profoundly mutable digital data utilising an Omniscient Frame, there is a fundamental conceptual shift in the creative re-shaping of the performance through a shared choreographic process. In the improvised choreographic and live performance process, qualitative differences in evaluating MoCap were identified. Study #1 (2015) is a collaborative screendance work by the authors, dancer (Author One), and digital artist (Author two). This piece utilises 3D Motion Capture technology and 3D digital animation software as part of a series of dance and moving image experiments. MoCap offers enhanced perspectives towards compositional awareness and evaluation between live and digital platforms. The human movement material produced in response to the MoCap technology optimises the potential of the technology and the human, moving body, with a catalysing force. We propose that what is transferred from live to digital via the omniscient motion capture camera informs what we see towards creative possibilities. We identify that the live performer as movement data does manifest as digital presence. We propose that we can view dance data and that this does aid performance – not towards quantitative evaluation but in capturing specific, human movement qualities towards qualitative artistic evaluation and critique.

Sustaining M?ori indigenous performative knowledge: Engaging practices that foster ihi within a contemporary dance theatre context

In this article I explore the creative potential of Māori indigenous performative knowledge such as ihi . My research investigated personal experiences as a performer and choreographer during the creative process, exploring and engaging with practices that foster ihi within contemporary performance. I draw on practice-led research methods in the choreographic and performance process of creating a duet called Ngā Whaiaipo o te Roto – Lovers of the Lake , performed in the Auckland Tempo Dance Festival (Williams, 2012). By exploring Māori concepts of performance within contemporary dance practices, I explored the potential to sustain indigenous knowledge, meanings and connections in how Māori cultural concepts are transferred into a theatre context.

Global Corporeality: Collaborative Choreography in Digital Space

While in residence Spring 2014 in Riga, Latvia we directed Global Corporeality: Collaborative Choreography in Digital Space, an international intermedial collaborative choreographic project between dance students of the Latvian Academy of Culture (LKA) and Idaho State University (ISU). This provided an opportunity to explore the collaborative possibilities of establishing a virtual community on the internet, where Latvian and American students could work together in composition by interacting online in real time in physical and virtual space. What resulted was a choreographic process and culminating event that existed in time and space in three simultaneous, interconnected performances—each containing elements of the other two. The web-streamed video performances captured the projected performances of live dancers on two different continents, creating an unending, self-referential performance loop. Each of the three simultaneous performance locations were different: in Riga, Latvian dancers performed with a live switched video projection of Latvian/US dancers; in Pocatello, Idaho, the US dancers performed with a projected video of the event; and the live switched video of the two cross-continental performances was available for public consumption on the internet. This article poses the initial concerns that formed the project, presents the process (providing links to YouTube recordings of each session), outlines some of our difficulties and discoveries, and explores some theoretical implications that emerged from Global Corporeality.

Choreographing lived experience: dance, feelings and the storytelling body

Although narrative-based research has been central to studies of illness experience, the inarticulate, sensory experiences of illness often remain obscured by exclusively verbal or textual inquiry. To foreground the body...

Relative proximity: Reaching towards an ethics of touch in cross-generational dance practice

Abstract This article addresses the potential for an embodied ethics of touch in the context of cross-generational dance work, in particular through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Focusing on choreographic processes and performances involving parents and children I examine the relationships that are reoriented through the shifting mode of being that is dancing together. This is in part an auto-ethnographic enquiry as I reflect on my own experiences as a new mother dancing with my daughter in Baby Jam1 and relating to her in life. Proximity is used as a way to frame the auto-ethnographic lens and to discuss ethics as a way of relating. This article suggests an ambiguous definition of ‘contact’: conceiving of it as a mode of communication as well as a dance practice The article questions how contact might be defined without the use of touch, by including the potential of touch as well as its actualization. Using Manning’s 2009 notion of relational movement, I refer to the ‘about-to-be’ moment in contact and the ethical relationships that this engenders. This article references three case studies as examples: my own cross-generational duet project with an adult mother and daughter, my experiences as a new mother and the work of Giulio D’Anna and his recent piece choreographed with his father Parkin’son. It discusses the ontological implications of contact across generations as a way of being together, reaching towards an ethics of touch rather than fixing its meaning.

ENTREVISTA COM RODRIGO PEDERNDEIRAS, COREÓGRAFO DO GRUPO CORPO (MG – BRASIL)

Entrevista realizada em 21 e 22 de setembro de 2012, quando da vinda do Grupo Corpo a Porto Alegre, como parte de sua turnê nacional. Constituiu instrumento de pesquisa na dissertação de mestrado do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Cênicas da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul: “COREOGRAFIA ‘21’ DO GRUPO CORPO: 21 percepções sobre o processo de criação cênica”. Acomodados nas poltronas da plateia do Teatro do SESI, enquanto os bailarinos faziam aula no palco, o entrevistado e a autora aprofundam o objeto de estudo (o processo coreográfico do balé “21”) e visitam outros temas que mostram alguns pontos de vista do coreógrafo do Grupo Corpo, Rodrigo Pederneiras. (Editada para fins de adequação ao espaço editorial, sem prejuízo ao conteúdo).

Emanating awareness: Tracing the impact of Bharatanatyam and Iyengar yoga on my contemporary dance and choreographic practice

Abstract This article examines and reflects on the interdisciplinary dialogue between Bharatanatyam, Iyengar yoga and contemporary dance within the field of choreographic practice and performance. I detail the principles appropriated from Bharatanatyam and Iyengar yoga that have, in a layered and intrinsic manner, directly and indirectly contributed to a heightened kinaesthetic awareness within my dance and choreographic practice. This practice reflects a strong somatic and philosophical ideology, out of which multiple body-mind perspectives emerge. Moving away from the Cartesian fragmented and objective view of the body, this article presents a holistic body-mind stance originating from a non-dualistic experiential approach. The principles appropriated from Bharatanatyam and Iyengar yoga are highlighted through a mixed-mode framework that includes experiential writing and images in an attempt to evoke the immediacy of the moving body and its sensory experience, as well as the ineffable nature of the creative and choreographic process. These experiences are contextualized with reference to specific choreographic work I have created for my company, Shakram Music and Dance.

Choreography and Performance with Deaf Adults who have Mental Illness: Culturally Affirmative Participatory Research

Dance/movement therapy (DMT) techniques, particularly choreography and performance techniques, have not been well-researched with Deaf adults who have mental illness. This study investigated the use of DMT, choreography, and performance techniques with Deaf adults with severe and chronic mental illness through participatory artistic inquiry. Primary research questions addressed pragmatic matters of participatory artistic inquiry: What aesthetic choices will the co-researchers make in the dance-making process? How does the researcher provide structure and incorporate her experience as a choreographer without overshadowing the contributions of the co-researchers? Broader philosophical research questions included: How does the use of American Sign Language and other culturally affirmative practices support the dance-making process? How do choreography and performance techniques impact this population’s well-being? Data was gathered by engaging the participants as co-researchers, involving them in the development of research protocol, data collection, data analysis, and the presentation of the research findings. Findings indicated that engaging in a choreographic process addressed the co-researchers’ preexisting treatment goals, provided opportunities for transferring skills learned in previous DMT groups, and empowered the co-researchers to incorporate performance techniques common to Deaf culture. The final choreographic product was presented at the site where the co-researchers receive mental health services and shared with the larger mental health care community through a digital video recording at http://vimeo.com/47632696.