Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art


Book Description

This book offers new ways of thinking about dance-related artworks that have taken place in galleries, museums and biennales over the past two decades as part of the choreographic turn. It focuses on the concept of intersubjectivity and theorises about what happens when subjects meet within a performance artwork. The resulting relations are crucial to instances of performance art in which embodied subjects engage as spectators, participants and performers in orchestrated art events. Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art deploys a multi-disciplinary approach across dance choreography and evolving manifestations of performance art. An innovative, overarching concept of choreography sustains the idea that intersubjectivity evolves through places, spaces, performance and spectatorship. Drawing upon international examples, the book introduces readers to performance art from the South Pacific and the complexities of de-colonising choreography. Artists Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy, Jordan Wolfson, Alicia Frankovich and Shigeyuki Kihara are discussed.




Moving Sites


Book Description

Moving Sites explores site-specific dance practice through a combination of analytical essays and practitioner accounts of their working processes. In offering this joint effort of theory and practice, it aims to provide dance academics, students and practitioners with a series of discussions that shed light both on approaches to making this type of dance practice, and evaluating and reflecting on it. The edited volume combines critical thinking from a range of perspectives including commentary and observation from the fields of dance studies, human geography and spatial theory in order to present interdisciplinary discourse and a range of critical and practice-led lenses through which this type of work can be considered and explored. In so doing, this book addresses the following questions: · How do choreographers make site-specific dance performance? · What occurs when a moving body engages with site, place and environment? · How might we interpret, analyse and evaluate this type of dance practice through a range of theoretical lenses? · How can this type of practice inform wider discussions of embodiment, site, space, place and environment? This innovative and exciting book seeks to move beyond description and discussion of site-specific dance as a spectacle or novelty and considers site-dance as a valid and vital form of contemporary dance practice that explores, reflects, disrupts, contests and develops understandings and practices of inhabiting and engaging with a range of sites and environments. Dr Victoria Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Chichester.




Choreographing Empathy


Book Description

"This is an urgently needed book – as the question of choreographing behavior enters into realms outside of the aesthetic domains of theatrical dance, Susan Foster writes a thoroughly compelling argument." – André Lepecki, New York University "May well prove to be one of Susan Foster’s most important works." – Ramsay Burt, De Montford University, UK What do we feel when we watch dancing? Do we "dance along" inwardly? Do we sense what the dancer’s body is feeling? Do we imagine what it might feel like to perform those same moves? If we do, how do these responses influence how we experience dancing and how we derive significance from it? Choreographing Empathy challenges the idea of a direct psychophysical connection between the body of a dancer and that of their observer. In this groundbreaking investigation, Susan Foster argues that the connection is in fact highly mediated and influenced by ever-changing sociocultural mores. Foster examines the relationships between three central components in the experience of watching a dance – the choreography, the kinesthetic sensations it puts forward, and the empathetic connection that it proposes to viewers. Tracing the changing definitions of choreography, kinesthesia, and empathy from the 1700s to the present day, she shows how the observation, study, and discussion of dance have changed over time. Understanding this development is key to understanding corporeality and its involvement in the body politic.




Performing Memory


Book Description

Through a post-1968 perspective on the past 50 years, Performing Memory brings together case studies on new developments in the relationship between politics and visual representation—including the histories of dance, theatre, political performance and cinema—and investigates how they relate to the interlinked concepts of visuality, corporeality and mobility. Using a collective transdisciplinary attitude from within historical disciplines, and looking across to artistic fields, this volume demonstrates that memory is not merely a recollection of experience but an interactive process, in which the body, mobile and constrained, is both a point of departure and reference.




Tandem Dances


Book Description

"In October 2017, four internationally influential practitioners of immersive experiences gathered at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island in New York for a panel discussion on the creation of immersive productions. The panel, entitled "All the World is a Stage," was part of the Future of Storytelling Festival 2017 (FoST FEST), advertised as "the world's leading immersive storytelling event." During this discussion, each of the four panelists described examples of their work. Hector Harkness, Associate Director of Punchdrunk International, explained how the company created productions that "rip up the rules for the audience" so they can "go beyond the boundaries of closed environments." Food technologist, experience designer, and multimedia artist Emilie Baltz described inviting audiences to step up to a microphone and use their tongues, teeth, and lips to play musical popsicles in an installation called PopStars. Jon Sands, founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, revealed how his strategic placement of poets on subway cars across New York City turned commutes into impromptu poetry slams for unsuspecting riders, some of whom joined in by improvising their own poetic works. Justin "JB" Bolognino, CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of META, an experience production company, described his commissioning of Jon Morris, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Windmill Factory, to design a music-festival queue into an experiential artwork. Entitled Right Passage, the work was a "room-scale sound and light performance installation" involving moving walls that guided festival participants efficiently into the concert venue (Windmill Factory 2017). Through their detailed descriptions of how their productions organized the bodies of performers and spectators in space and time, the panelists hinted at the presence of choreography in their productions"--




Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum


Book Description

Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum investigates the art museum as a space where the contemporary is staged – in exhibitions, collecting practices, communication, and policies. Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum traces the art museum back to the postwar era. Including contributions by established and emerging art historians, academics and curators, the book proposes that the art museum is engaged in the contemporary in a double sense: it (re)presents contemporary art, while the contemporary condition itself also has a significant impact on art and the museum that houses it. Presenting a diverse range of international cases of exhibitions and curatorial practices, which hail primarily from Europe and Scandinavia, the essays examine the politics of staging “national”, “international”, and “global” framings of modernism, as well as the new public spaces shaped in digital practices and changing political frameworks. The book investigates both the seminal and the unknown exhibitions and institutions that created contemporary art as we know it today. Curating the Contemporary in the Art Museum provides a historical perspective on the museum of contemporary art. It constitutes a step towards differencing the canon of modernist and contemporary art and a more complex understanding of the politics of curating the contemporary in the art museum, why it will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, curating, exhibitions, and art history.




Choreographing Problems


Book Description

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.




Ethics and the Arts


Book Description

This book proposes that the highest expression of ethics is an aesthetic. It suggests that the quintessential performance of any field of practice is an art that captures an ethic beyond any literal statement of values. This is to advocate for a shift in emphasis, away from current juridical approaches to ethics (ethical codes or regulation), toward ethics as an aesthetic practice—away from ethics as a minimal requirement, toward ethics as an aspiration. The book explores the relationship between art and ethics: a subject that has fascinated philosophers from ancient Greece to the present. It explores this relationship in all the arts: literature, the visual arts, film, the performing arts, and music. It also examines current issues raised by ‘hybrid’ artists who are working at the ambiguous intersections between art, bio art and bioethics and challenging ethical limits in working with living materials. In considering these issues the book investigates the potential for art and ethics to be mutually challenged and changed in this meeting. The book is aimed at artists and students of the arts, who may be interested in approaching ethics and the arts in a new way. It is also aimed at students and teachers of ethics and philosophy, as well as those working in bioethics and the health professions. It will have appeal to the ‘general educated reader’ as being current, of considerable interest, and offering a perspective on ethics that goes beyond a professional context to include questions about how one approaches ethics in one’s own life and practices.




Museum Bodies


Book Description

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.




Moving Kinship


Book Description

In this compelling text, choreographer and psychotherapist Beatrice Allegranti invites the reader into the transdisciplinary Moving Kinship project. Moving Kinship spans a decade of practice-led research with people experiencing early onset dementia; Black feminist activists; psychotherapists; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer artists and activists; capoeiristas; and an international team of professional dancers and composers, musicians and scientists. Allegranti’s practice is a more-than-collaboration: it involves accounting for deeply embodied and embedded oppression and privilege in the micro-relating of everyday life. She discusses this reckoning as a kin-aesthetic practice, and the message is foundationally feminist. The book opens possibilities for different registers of feminist justice and puts feminist new materialism, posthumanism and intersectional body politics to work in ways that affirm the paradox that every living thing moves everywhere, all the time, yet every movement is never neutral. As a white Italian-Irish feminist with a transgenerational legacy of the corrosive impact of fascism, she also weaves her own kinship story into dominating systems of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, intersecting in ways that are alive and well today. Moving Kinship offers a rich resource for feminist activists and scholars, trauma-informed therapists, somatic, movement and dance practitioners, artists and those interested in ethical and politically just ways to materially engage with grief, loss, dispossession and trauma.