Contemporary Dance Performance Research Articles

Смыслообразование в танцевальном перформансе

The article is dedicated to the process of meaning-making in contemporary dance performance as an art form. The author examines the role of the body and movements in conveying emotions, ideas, and messages, as well as the interaction between choreographers, performers, and audiences. Special attention is given to the internal bodily sensations and experiences of the performer, which manifest through a unique plastic language. The significance of contextual aspects such as cultural, historical, and social factors in shaping meaning in dance performance is also noted. The article emphasizes that dance performance is not only a form of artistic expression but also a means of communication capable of transmitting diverse emotions and ideas. It analyzes the plastic language, including movement techniques, symbolic gestures, and compositional methods. The interaction with space and objects is explored, contributing to the expansion of emotional and visual meanings. The article underscores the importance of audience interpretation and emotional response, which play a significant role in the creation and perception of meaning in dance performance. The author highlights that dance performance serves as a platform for investigating and experimenting with various semantic structures and their impact on spectators, ultimately revealing the depth and diversity of the human experience through the language of the body and movements.

LIGHTING DESIGN SCHEMES AND COLOURS IN DANCE PERFORMANCES: THE MAGICAL ILLUSION

Dance is a creative expression of movements, patterns, and stories they perform. The lighting design contributes to a complete theatrical experience for the audience by highlighting and framing every movement in each dance piece at the right moment. In solos and duets, lighting can emphasize this intimacy by using different spotlights in a particular area and it can make the rest of the stage dark. Different lighting fixtures will help by adding texture to the dance performances. The ambient lighting helps to set the scene, often shadow lighting, and backlighting produces striking images to elevate the body lines and also emphasize the shapes and angles. Few dance groups perform with the integrity of new technologies and Body.This article aims to attempt a definitive and comprehensive illustration of how light design plays an important role in contemporary performances. The lighting design as an art form within the theater is certainly a creative process that illuminates the performer's body to create a visual bonanza experienced by the spectator. In contemporary dance performances, it became an essential illustrative medium rather than decorative elements like in some traditional dance performances.Lighting design is a scenic art in contemporary dance performances concerned with atmosphere and 'body form' in relation to the performance space. The lighting design for a performance with a style and colour on a performer's body creates the magical illusion that is being experienced by the audience. Combinations of lighting design styles and body pigment are crucial and Indian contemporary dance groups adopted such technologies and make some interesting performances.This study analyzes how lighting design influences dance works as a creative approach to performance-making. Blending of costume, makeup, set, interactive media, and lighting design is an added advantage that we can observe in these Indian contemporary Performances. This paper analyzes how lighting design and dance are an integral part of a colorful performance.

Embodied cultural property: Contemporary and traditional dance practices

AbstractThis article discusses the implications of recording and digitizing a variety of cultural and contemporary dance performance practices, core to a European project known as WhoLoDancE, which focused on issues of reuse, ownership, property, and responsibility. The recordings and subsequent processing of dance material into digital data raised questions about the responsibilities to the dancers who have contributed their material to the project, particularly when it is transformed into data visualizations that can be accessed and reused by others. The article not only focuses on how value accrues in these kinds of resources and sometimes in unexpected ways but also draws attention to how dance remains bound to the communities in which it is performed and tends to resist its abstraction from the body to be commodified as a form of cultural property. This then points to how dance, as intangible cultural heritage, is self-regulating in terms of principles of ownership and attribution.

The costume designer as co-author of contemporary dance performance: Erika Turunen’s signature style

With the aim of contributing to the scholarship on costume designers’ agential collaboration within contemporary dance, this article centres on the creative authorship of the designer. Using the notions of ‘signature style’ and ‘authorship’ as the key research lenses, it investigates the work of Finnish costume designer Erika Turunen within contemporary dance, specifically her collaboration with choreographer Tero Saarinen. Drawing from in-person interviews with the designer and materials related to her costumes, this article addresses the issues of re-invention versus repetition, and process and outcome as two interlinked steps in the creation of Turunen’s signature style.

Conceptualizing the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art form

This paper attempts to conceptualize the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances through the aesthetic lenses of performance art. The expressiveness of performance art forms is frequently praised for the emotions we have toward them. These feelings are derived from the symbolic connotations and functionalities of the arts in life. Through an exploratory design of qualitative inquiry, the researchers focus on a contextual dialogue on the aesthetic visual presentations of selected contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art forms. The critical content analysis of music videos was espoused to examine the stylistic body movements and gestures coded in some contemporary Ghanaian dances such as Azonto, Twerking, Kupe, Pilolo and Shoo as part of an empirical artistic study. Instruments for data collection were observation, document analysis and photography for the contextual visual content analyses grounded in semiotic and aesthetic theoretical discourse. This study again relied heavily on secondary data from recorded communication including music videos, books, transcripts, websites, newspaper articles, journal articles and the like to make objective inferences. The findings indicate that dance is the communication that occurs via the conduit of the dancer's body that ruptures individuals' independent existence and generates a sense of finitude. Whereas some of the dances make aggressively erotic visual statements, others are mere expressive gestural and body movements to simply entertain a targeted audience. The result further shows that, the contemporary Ghanaian dance performances transcend beyond mere entertainment but rather are an embodiment of body language emerging from the indigenous dance symbolisms. Teaching learners to perceive visual aesthetic qualities and symbolic interpretations in dance performances will deepen the appreciation of Ghanaian dance performances not just as entertainment but as another medium for expression to transmit their inherent messages. It is suggested that, these dance forms should be formalized as indigenous knowledge in a quest to blend tradition with modernity in our creative endeavours. This knowledge should be propagated through creative arts education in Ghanaian schools. Other performance art components displayed in contemporary Ghanaian dances including body painting, facial expressions, costumology and fashion accessories present another lacuna for further research by future researchers. Key words: aesthetics, dance, therapy, performance art, body, movement

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.

포스트코로나 시대 무용공연의 창작 활성화를 위한 장소 특정적 공연 연구

With COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, performance activities have been strictly restricted and even cancelled and it is not difficult to predict the recurring of similar situations even after the current pandemic is over. Therefore, the performing arts, which are to be affected by space and time restrictions, have reached a turning point for the paradigm shift on space. The researcher examines the impact of COVID-19 on the performing arts, and proposes a site-specific dance performance as one of the directions for creative revitalization of contemporary dance performances. In addition, the purpose of this study is to derive the characteristics of site-specific dance performances from home and abroad as well as to understand the meaning of site-specific performances in the performing arts in a multi-dimensional way.

Babyface: Performance and Installation Art Exploring the Feminine Ideal in Gendered Machines.

Representations of gender in new technologies like the Siri, Pepper, and Sophia robotic assistants, as well as the commodification of features associated with gender on platforms like Instagram, inspire questions about how and whether robotic tools can have gender and what it means to people if they do. One possible response to this is through artistic creation of dance performance. This paper reports on one such project where, along the route to this inquiry, creation of machine augmentation – of both the performer and audience member – was necessary to communicate the artistic ideas grappled with therein. Thus, this article describes the presentation of Babyface, a machine-augmented, participatory contemporary dance performance. This work is a reaction to feminized tropes in popular media and modern technology, and establishes a parallel between the ways that women and machines are talked about, treated, and – in the case of machines – designed to look and behave. This paper extends prior reports on the creation of this piece and its accompanying devices to describe extensions with audience member participation, and reflect on the responses of these audience members. These fabricated elements alongside the actions of the performer and a soundscape that quotes statements made by real “female” robots create an otherwordly, sad cyborg character that causes viewers to question their assumptions about and pressures on the feminine ideal.

Ecoartivism in Times of Climate Change and Toxic Waste Emergencies: A Theoretical Perspective through the Lens of ziREjA's Photography and Performance Art

Ecoartivism in Times of Climate Change and Toxic Waste Emergencies:A Theoretical Perspective through the Lens of ziREjA's Photography and Performance Art Rosita Scerbo The 21st century ecological crisis is a tragic reality. In recent years, contemporary artists have become advocates for climate change solutions and environmental activism, addressing issues like ecological practices, toxic waste, sustainability, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. In this context, this study aims to explore and analyze the photography and performance art of Irene Sanfiel (ziREjA), an award-winning contemporary artist based in Tenerife, a Spanish archipelago located in the Atlantic Ocean. The different sections of my investigation will introduce a selection of theoretical approaches that will attempt to conceptualize some fundamental notions such as eco-art, ecology, and ARTivism (Buckland 2010; Bunting 2014; Cheetham 2013; Andrews 2004; Lippard 2007; Morton 2010). On the one hand, one of the main focuses of this essay will be her trash art images that include the human figure, different representations of climate change, and trash accumulation's exponential effects, and its related problems. Some of her activist projects' objects of my study, such as "La maga vestida", gather photographs of ziREja wearing the traditional Tenerife folkloric dress in the insular garbage management service. The female subject is always surrounded by a waste mountain that shows the reality of the island and a side that is not often shown to the public. The Spanish artist plays with concepts related to gender, body, tradition, trash accumulation, and responsibility, thus turning her activist work into a powerful weapon against our destructive treatment of the earth. Other photographic projects, such as "itrash coreografías con la basura" and "yesWetrash", play with the image of the body adjacent to trash and sometimes use irony and comedy employing contradictory and oxymoron illustrations to engage the viewers and provoke them to think about the consequences that our actions and decisions have on the future of the planet. On the other hand, another center of attention of this research will be ziRejA's performance art and how it dialogues with ecological and social problems. Her eco-art installations show the disposition of the garbage in different parts of the city to make the spectators reflect on how much waste is produced by an average citizen ("Trash comes back to the city") or make the viewers contemplate the relation between trash and [End Page 141] the body through contemporary experimental dance performances ("iTrash"). Ultimately, this investigation will consider how these different uses address environmental issues and connect with her audiences and how they engage with her activist goals. The entirety of the art pieces analyzed in this study was produced on the famous island of Tenerife, ziREjA's own native land and well-known location of mass tourism and damaging socioenvironmental processes. As the most populous island of the Canary Islands, Tenerife receives about 5 million tourists each year (Andrews 2004) who contribute drastically to the increase of the toxic waste emergency. This large island in the Atlantic Ocean represents perfectly the innovative concept of "slow violence" introduced by Rob Nixon as the violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, and other environmental emergencies that take place gradually and often invisibly. Nixon highlights the inattention we have paid to the lethality of many environmental crises, and we will see how this approach resonates with ziREjA's activist work. Historical Overview Ecological art or Eco-art is a practice in the art world that aims to preserve and repair the different life forms and resources of the earth. This approach to art applies the principles of ecosystems to living species and their environment and it includes wilderness, rural, suburban, and urban locations (Weintraub 2012). It is essential to clarify that this is a distinct genre from Environmental art that instead focuses its attention on functional ecological systems-restoration. This genre takes part in socially engaged, activist, and community-based interventions. Another specific aspect of Ecological art is based on the fact that this practice deals with economics, ethics, politics, culture, and aesthetic values and the way these impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art brings together artists, scientists, philosophers, and activists who work in a collaboratively on restoration...

A Study on the Effect of Selection Attributes of Contemporary Dance Performance on Audience's Attitude and Tickets Purchase Intention

A Study on the Effect of Selection Attributes of Contemporary Dance Performance on Audience's Attitude and Tickets Purchase Intention

Relationship between Marketing Mix Strategies of Contemporary Dance Performances and Audiences’ Watching Factors

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between marketing mix strategies of contemporary dance performance and audiences’ watching factors. To achieve this purpose, an analysis was conducted with data of 391 contemporary dance audiences to draw the following conclusions. First, as a result of an examination of the correlation between marketing mix strategies of contemporary dance performance and audiences’ watching factors, marketing mix strategies had positive correlations with all watching factors. Second, as a result of an examination of the marketing mix strategies of contemporary dance performance and the satisfaction factor, there were significant impacts on the satisfaction factor in the following order: Place, price, people, product, and process. Third, as a result of an examination of marketing mix strategies of contemporary dance performance and the re-watching factor, there were significant impacts on the re-watching factor in the following order: Place, physical environment, and price. Fourth, as a result of an examination of the relationship between marketing mix strategies of contemporary dance performance and the recommendation factor, there were significant impacts on the recommendation factor in the following order: Place, people, price, product, and physical environment.

НЕПРОФЕССИОНАЛЫ НА ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЙ СЦЕНЕ: ЭСТЕТИКА ОБЫДЕННОГО В СОВРЕМЕННОМ ТЕАТРЕ И ТАНЦЕ

The article explores the tendency of inviting non-professional artists to contemporary theatre and dance performances. From the examples of the Rimini Protokoll, Jérôme Bel, Nicole Seiler, Tatyana Gordeeva, Vsevolod Lisovsky and Dmitry Volkostrelov performances it is shown how the participation of “ordinary” people serves aesthetic and ethical purposes of the stage directors and choreographers. Ordinary bodies, gestures and voices in contemporary theatre are valued as manifesting the extra-institutional identity of the participants, namely, a professional or social one, with which the spectators could easily identify themselves. The non-virtuosity of movements and speech, making mistakes and even fatigue, become specially constructed “signs of naturalness”. Participatory projects in which the main action is expected to be performed by the audience can be seen also as a performance with non-professional artists. The borders between artistic and non-artistic in such projects are blurred. Likewise, the community creation, the attention paid to other people and the inclusion of “everyday” life becomes its main aesthetic feature.

Emerging Frameworks for Engaging Precarity and “Otherness” in Greek Contemporary Dance Performances

At the dawn of the European refugee crisis, and in the middle of the ongoing sociopolitical and financial crisis in Greece, Greek choreographers started creating dance works that engaged immigrants and refugees. In most such initiatives, improvisation became the tool for bridging the disparity between the professional dancers and the “untrained” participants, who were often the vulnerable populations of refugees and asylum seekers. In this essay, I question the ethics and aesthetics of these methodological approaches utilized for staging encounters between natives and migrants through dance. In particular, I consider the significance of improvisation as potentially perpetuating hierarchical inequalities in the framework of Western concert dance, while I also highlight the ways that such artistic endeavors end up presenting immigrants and refugees as “Others.”

Engaging With Contemporary Dance: What Can Body Movements Tell us About Audience Responses?

In live performances seated audiences have restricted opportunities for response. Some responses are obvious, such as applause and cheering, but there are also many apparently incidental movements including posture shifts, fixing hair, scratching and adjusting glasses. Do these movements provide clues to people's level of engagement with a performance? Our basic hypothesis is that audience responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience-performer communication. This communication is part of what distinguishes live from recorded performance and underpins live performers' moment-to-moment sense of how well a performance is going. Here we investigate the range of visible real-time movements of audiences in four live contemporary dance performances. Video recordings of performers and audiences were analyzed using computer vision techniques for extracting face, hand and body movement data. The meaning of audience movements were analyzed by comparing clips of the audience at moments of maximum and minimum movement to expert and novice judges. The results show that audience clips with the lowest overall movement are judged as displaying the highest engagement. In addition, we found that while there is no systematic relationship between audience and dancers movement, hands seem to play an especially significant role since they move significantly more compared to the rest of the body. We draw on these findings to argue that collective stillness is an especially salient signal of audience engagement.

Political by Design: Costume Design Strategies within the Finnish Contemporary Dance Productions AmazinGRace, Noir? and The Earth Song

Abstract This article examines costume design within three Finnish contemporary dance productions in the 2010s, AmazinGRace, Noir? and The Earth Song, by respective costume designers Soile Savela, Sanna Levo and Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila, to identify the ways in which costume works within performances with political themes through cases that make use of ‘everyday’ garments as costumes. Here, everyday garments as costume refers to identifiable forms, silhouettes and connotations, as opposed to fantasy or ‘abstract’ costumes. Political, as defined by the themes of these performances, means subject to power relations: societal inequality, ethnicity and otherness and climate change. Despite having shared ground in employing everyday, real-life costume components, all three designs operate with a distinct strategy. Hence, this article discusses three strategies for materializing political aesthetics through costume: one that is inclusive in its use of ‘ordinary’ clothes as costume; one that builds itself through ready-made connotation and representation in costume; and one that is associative in its approach towards the capacity of costume. This investigation, from the perspective of a costume researcher and designer, not only argues for the potential of costume to communicate political meaning through its aesthetic choices but also reveals the versatility embedded in this under-researched area of everyday garments as costume within contemporary dance performance.

Delicate Faces, Virtuosic Bodies

In this article Krittika Mondal studies the performance tradition of Gotipua, a dance from the Puri district in the eastern coast of Odisha, India, to analyse how it engages the child figure to showcase itself on the contemporary stage.Gotipua is a dance performed by multiple young male bodies, dressed as women. It is widely considered that Gotipua was popular in 17th century Odisha, under the patronage of the temples of the Puri district. It was taught by the gurus of maharis (female dancers of the temple; also known as devadasis in other places) to young, pre-pubescent boys who were donated to the temples. Gotipua was freely performed in public spaces during ritual festivities while mahari remained a dance exclusively for the deity, performed only inside the sanctum sanctorum. It is believed to have been a replacement for mahari dance in the years that it was banned from being performed. In its present form, Gotipua is a contemporary dance performance intercepted heavily with acrobatics, performed exclusively by young bodies.Robin Bernstein (2006) uses Joseph Roach’s (1996) seminal theorisation of ‘surrogation’ to make tangible the idea of “imagined” childhood as opposed to “real” childhood. In Gotipua, the surrogation of childhood is rooted in an excess - that of virtuosity - displayed by the cross-dressing, and the physicality in its contemporary core elements of bandha-nrutya (acrobatic movements that need tremendous muscle-suppleness) and tableau formations (choreographed body-constructions of the temple structures and sculptures). With the delinking of Gotipua from temple spaces in the contemporary times, and its placement in the global dance network, this article seeks to investigate the “imagined childhood” showcased by Gotipua through its form and choreography.

Style-based motion analysis for dance composition

Synthesizing human motions from existing motion capture data is the approach of choice in most applications requiring high- quality visual results. Usually to synthesize motion, short motion segments are concatenated into longer sequences by finding transitions at points where character poses are similar. If similarity is only a measure of posture correlation, without consideration for the stylistic variations of movement, the resulting motion might have unnatural discontinuities. Particularly prone to this problem are highly stylized motions, such as dance performances. This work presents a motion analysis framework, based on Laban Movement Analysis, that also accounts for stylistic variations of the movement. Implemented in the context of Motion Graphs, it is used to eliminate potentially problematic transitions and synthesize style-coherent animation, without requiring prior labeling of the data. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by synthesizing contemporary dance performances that include a variety of different emotional states. The algorithm is able to compose highly stylized motions that are reminiscent to dancing scenarios using only plausible movements from existing clips.

Selection Factors and Type analysis of watching Contemporary Dance Performance

Selection Factors and Type analysis of watching Contemporary Dance Performance

Study on the Components of Work to Improve thePopularity of Contemporary Dance Performances

Study on the Components of Work to Improve thePopularity of Contemporary Dance Performances

Water matters: TUG onboard and TUG footpath

This article uses Dog Kennel Hill Project’s contemporary dance performance TUG as a case study to explore waterways as sites for performance and to consider performances on water in relation to: the specificity of water as a material, the mode of mobility in performance, the live event as a transitory experience and an intimate encounter. This article offers an analysis of the two separate audience experiences of TUG performed on a narrow boat on Watford Canal, exploring materiality and proximity through Gaston Bachelard’s ideas about the ‘intimacy’ of water explicated in Water and Dreams. The onboard version is performed for a small audience seated on the boat, while the footpath version involves participants walking alongside the boat via the towpath while listening to an audio-guide. This article will discuss the role the water plays in both of these experiences. This analysis will consider recent performance practices that engage with mobility, water and boats and argues that water in performance matters and that live performance sited on water can evoke a unique, intimate and transitory experience.