1,720,989 research outputs found
Equivalence (production assistance (performance, spatial, and video installations); concept and choreography William Forsythe/The Forsythe Company)
No full textComprised of Theatrical Arsenal (premiere); Monster Partitur (2006); Hinderhold (premiere); Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time (2005); Flandona Gagnole (premiere); Thematic Variations on One Flat Thing, reproduced (Dir. Thierry de Mey, 2003); Antipodes I/II (2006); and Additive Inverse (2007)
Three Imagined Dances: the somatics of early modern textual mediation
Get PDFThis thesis addresses how historical narratives, ideas, and practices of dance are carried in the transference between books and bodies. To do its work, this thesis investigates the presence of dance in early modern book culture, seeking how such texts are not only representative of but also laden with the problems of body, sensory experience, and practice. Thus, this is a thesis that considers the infiltration and implication of bodies in early modern book culture; in it I reconsider what the body-based art of dance was doing on the early modern page. Framed as metaphor, as disease, as an ethical conundrum, as uncontainable joy, as lasciviousness, as indicative of cosmic balance, dance appears again and again within early modern texts as a means to discuss concerns with the body. Early modern writings on dance probe the embodied practice and sensual experience of dancing for its deeper connections to the world, the divine, to ethics, to health, and to questions of knowledge and sensorial experience. The constellation of writings herein investigated from the 15th and 16th centuries traverses early modern thought on mortality, faith, love, the erotic, antiquity, alchemy, and disease through their articulations of act of dancing, what it means and how it networks into the greater scheme of embodied praxis. Through these texts, this thesis further probes what the subject of dance did to book culture in the period in turn. My aim is to show how an intermedia history between the written word and the dance also speaks to the conditions of embodiment. Toward that end, this thesis unfolds a series of cases in which the writerly use of dancing and dancerly use of writing expose the mutual implication of writing and dancing as intertwined embodied and discursive practices. Together, writing and dancing have through relationship to one another defined and redefined the very idea of the experience of being in a body. The methods I employ in the thesis draw from the tradition of the microhistory and the capacity of microhistorical approaches to make use of the subtleties and difficulties in sources. Over the course of three chapters, the thesis considers three cases of writing on the dancing body interwoven as if by happenstance through their various associations with one particular Parisian family in the 16th century, their book publishing house on the Rue St Jacques, and their network of associated colleagues. Finally, each chapter approaches the relations between embodiment, dance, and book culture by considering how ideas on embodiment expressed through the description of dance in the book interacted with the bodily perspectives that arise from book culture: the readerly body, the protagonist's body, and the authorial body
The Pageantry of Western Bodies: Material Practices, Intercorporealities and Cultural Recycling in the Twenty-First Century
Get PDFThis thesis argues for a new way of thinking about the corporeality in cultural performance. Drawing on performance theory, cultural analysis, corporeal and materialist discourses, I demonstrate how the new workings of bodily materiality and its dramaturgical configurations constitute an extra layer of meaning, most readily discerned when the body is deliberately placed on a public display, thus also exposing and highlighting its – often exaggerated – material workings. The concept of material as used in this study does not denote the anatomical or organic, although it is informed by them; nor does it imply the purely representational body. What I call for is a quality of “presentness” engendered through materiality, between organic and representational, that is informed by historical and cultural context and the workings of fleshy reality, as well as the meanings created by the bodily image. The material layer persistently reveals itself in the four case studies which embody the “pageantry” of contemporary Western bodies and comprise the thesis: the dead body as represented by Gunther von Hagens’ plastinates, the pop body produced by contemporary popular culture, homo nudus, or the naked body, as it appears in theatre performance and the wrestler’s body in the context of professional wrestling. By departing from the well-established postmodern and phenomenological terminology, the study re-evaluates the contemporary status of the body and its reception, and offers new approaches to the heterogeneous bodily manifestations of the twenty-first century
Affective Dramaturgies in Contemporary Dance Leaky Encounters and Turbulent Spectating
Get PDFBridging the gap between performance dramaturgies and critical discourse. This thesis proposes that contemporary dance choreographic practices that emerged in the UK during the 1980s onwards challenge the established approaches of critical appreciation and resist conventions of interpretation and genre classification. Choreographers discussed in this thesis are part of a lineage of new creative practices in contemporary dance that demand a different discourse about spectating dance. They require awareness of how the actions of spectating affect the audience and resist traditional discourses of critical appreciation. Their works contribute to a re-theatricalisation of dance choreography that is influenced by European Tanztheater, and in particular, by the choreographer Pina Bausch. Choreographers discussed include Liz Aggiss, Lea Anderson, Matthew Bourne, Jonathan Burrows, Michael Clark, Yolande Snaith and Ian Spink. They are independent dance makers whose works share dramaturgic processes that foreground affective spectating. These choreographic dramaturgies afford increased agency to spectators and highlight processes of how the dances create affective encounters within the performances. I bring first-hand experience and dance knowledge of movement training and choreographic approaches that inform this research and I reflect on the ways in which these artists resisted existing frameworks of critical discourse. As a dance student, performer and scholar during this era, I studied or worked with several of these choreographers, as well as attending performances of many of their pieces in addition to those analysed in this thesis. Their choreography made significant new demands on spectators by resisting interpretations and shifting attention to how the dance exposes spectators to their own processes of engaging with a performance, to focus on what the dance does instead of what it is about. The affective impact of contemporary dance became the central feature of their creative practices, yet the existing critical discourse lacked appropriate terms and concepts to address the significance of these works. Established approaches to dance analysis and critical, academic discourses have had limited success in articulating the complex demands of such dance works and it is those aspects of affective engagement that are the focus of this study in relation to dramaturgic and choreographic forms. This thesis proposes a reframing of critical analysis based on concepts of dramaturgy as a bridge between conventional frameworks of dance discourse and the creative practices. This thesis introduces a notion of 'leaky' dramaturgies, where encountering also operates outside the frame of the performance itself. How spectators encounter contemporary dance works is the central question of this thesis and this study proposes that discourses of dramaturgy and affect are effective in articulating how these works create spectating encounters. I define these encounters as having a two-part dramaturgy that is characterised as 'turbulent' during the performance event, evoking effects of disorientation, excitement and intensity, and also as 'leaky' in encounters outside the performance itself. In combination, leaky and turbulent systems within the choreographic and performance practices, contribute to the disruptive, affective impact of the work. I place this research in the field of phenomenological dance studies to contribute to the discourse of spectating dramaturgies in contemporary dance. The thesis finds that a discourse of affective dramaturgies is effective to articulate leaky processes and turbulent spectating of contemporary dance
Towards a Ludic Ecology: Popular Participatory Peripatetic Performance
Get PDFThis practice-as-research project investigates the interrelations between performance, playfulness, and ecology, highlighting these as constituting an important nexus of study in the current ecological context. I explore ways of performatively facilitating ludic interactions between people and their environments, investigate what benefits might accrue from doing so, examine the structure and significance of these interactions, and consider the role of performance training in their facilitation. Conducting practice-as-research ‘in the wild’ (cf. Hutchins, 1995) provides a unique and valuable perspective from which to interrogate current and historical thinking regarding play. The rigorous supporting rationale provided suggests potential areas of impact and value for the practice beyond the performances themselves. The qualitative evidence presented supports my argument that ludic (playful) performance can positively recalibrate participants’ environmental attitudes and relations.
In order to conduct this practical inquiry, I reflexively develop an original methodology: Popular Participatory Peripatetic Performance, or 4P for short. I fully integrate playfulness into three replicable models of practice, derived from 4P, each employing a different modality of peripatetic performance. They are: Perplexpedition – an intervention in public space; Wandercast – an audio-walk podcast; and Spinstallation – a performance workshop. Each of these forms a dynamic and responsive live artwork, enacted and documented in numerous iterations, which allows for reflexive development of the models themselves as well as the overarching 4P methodology; each constitutes research process and outcome. My aim in devising this tripartite approach has been to achieve significant comprehensiveness and also to render the project accessible and attractive to as wide a variety of participants as possible, thereby maximising its validity and the generalisability of its findings.
Ecology is formulated here in line with Gregory Bateson’s “ecology of mind” ([1972] 2000: xxiii), which seeks a holistic understanding of living systems through the recognition of far-reaching patterns and formal regularities. This project builds upon Bateson’s notion that play constitutes one such pattern to develop the conceptual framework and practical approach that I term ludic ecology. I also employ James J. Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordance and draw on Baz Kershaw’s (2007) ecological approach to performance studies, using them interdependently to structure and support this project from both practical and theoretical perspectives.
This project contributes primarily to three fields: ecological performance, through an original methodology and modes of practice; practice-as-research, through a novel theoretical stance and documentation techniques; and play-studies, by refining a distinction between play and playfulness and elucidating their philosophical status. This writing aims to clarify these contributions and thus position the project as “praxis” not only as “theory imbricated within practice” (Nelson, 2013: 5), but also practice imbricated within theory
The Returns (dramaturgy; Chor. William Forsythe/The Forsythe Company)
No full textFull-length performance by The Forsythe Company, choreography William Forsythe. Premiere: 24 June 2009, Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden. Performances 2009-2014
Heterotopia (dramaturgy; Chor. William Forsythe/The Forsythe Company)
No full textFull-length dance performance by The Forsythe Comapny, choreographer William Forsythe. Premiere: 25 October 2006, Schiffbau Halle I, Zürich, Switzerland, performances 2006-2013
- …
