Contemporary Choreography

A Critical Reader

Jo Butterworth, Liesbeth Wildschut, Jo Butterworth, Liesbeth Wildschut

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317191575
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Dance

Fully revised and updated, this second edition of Contemporary Choreography presents a range of articles covering choreographic enquiry, investigation into the creative process, and innovative challenges to traditional understandings of dance making.

Contributions from a global range of practitioners and researchers address a spectrum of concerns in the field, organized into seven broad domains:

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• Conceptual and philosophical concerns
• Processes of making
• Dance dramaturgy: structures, relationships, contexts
• Choreographic environments
• Cultural and intercultural contexts
• Challenging aesthetics
• Choreographic relationships with technology.

Including 23 new chapters and 10 updated ones, Contemporary Choreography captures the essence and progress of choreography in the twenty-first century, supporting and encouraging rigorous thinking and research for future generations of dance practitioners and scholars.

Section 1

Conceptual and philosophical concerns

Section introduction

Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut

When we wrote the introduction to this section in the first edition of Contemporary Choreography ten years ago, we argued for the acceptance of choreography as a form of knowledge. We asked questions relating to the perception of, and engagement in, choreographic processes and outcomes, and we queried how knowledge of the broader philosophical field might help us to understand, contextualize, interpret and unfold the significance of the dance.

Today, relevant questions relating to dance studies, and particularly to the specific focus of choreography, are burgeoning. The field is in transition. Researchers and creatives are generating concepts, identifying theories and personalizing them; but these theories and concepts are not necessarily new. They are appropriated, reconsidered and re-cited to suit the needs of each individual researcher or maker on their own terms. Students are encouraged to select from a broad range of themes and ideas – aesthetic, cultural, political and other discourses generated from all over the world – and to apply them vicariously. The influence of globalization and the world wide web is phenomenal, and yet, ironically, as a dance colleague said recently, ‘everyone is citing everyone’.

How many more departments of Dance, Theatre and Performance have emerged since we published the first edition? How many members of staff have gained their doctorates and are publishing new research? And what is current, what are the ‘hot topics’ of this decade?

Some might say neuroscience, motion capture or intermediality in performance. Others are interested in involvement strategies, embodiment, empathy or corporeal literacy, performance and public spaces or relationships between the performing arts and visual culture. The place of phenomenology in dance studies has developed exponentially, often with an intertextual dimension. These and other sub-disciplines of the field of dance studies have expanded immensely in the recent past. New developments in technology have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation, and a focus on choreography is no longer simply a focus on dance. In the twenty-first century, dance making and performance includes theatre, music, film or video, creative writing, photography, design and the visual arts, often informed by digital and other technologies, to produce mixed or relational performance processes. The practices of composition – for example training, improvisation, devising, rehearsal, installation, curating and writing – have responded to mediatization and globalization. Thus, in response, a range of ways of thinking about these complex creations has evolved, including post-humanism, post-phenomenology, post-capitalism and cognitive studies.

Contemporary performance practices are increasingly hybrid projects that transcend the borders of theatre, dance, visual arts, music, media and daily life. Dance and performance practices are inextricably linked with other media that shape our reality; they extend well beyond the walls of the lecture room, dance studio or theatre, and inject themselves into our daily lives. Dance cannot fully be analysed outside its socio-cultural context. At the other end of the spectrum, theories and concepts derived from the performing arts, specifically dance, are progressively deployed in cultural theory and in the social and health sciences. Such a field in transition demands an approach that investigates dance and choreography as intermedial and interdisciplinary phenomena.

The contributors to this section are seminar figures in the field, authors whose research, knowledge and experience are well known, valued and respected.

The first three chapters appeared in the first edition of Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader, but have been revised. The last two chapters introduce the increasingly influential work of two authors, Bojana Cvejic´ and Ben Spatz.

Anna Pakes’ discussion seeks to show how philosophical ideas about practical knowledge, reasoning and wisdom are relevant to choreography and dance practice. For Pakes, how choreography generates knowledge and of what kind(s) have become increasingly urgent questions with the development and institutionalization of practice as research in dance. One way to address these questions, she posits, is to look to philosophical accounts of practical as distinct from theoretical knowledge, of ‘knowing how’ rather than ‘knowing that’, developed (for example) by Gilbert Ryle (1963) and David Carr (1978, 1984, 1999). Such accounts suggest choreographic action is inflected by practical reasoning, which operates differently to its theoretical counterpart: governed by a logic of satisfaction in relation to aims and surrounding circumstances (and not the logic of truth and falsity), practical reasoning culminates in action rather than theoretical insight. That reasoning is laid bare in choreographers’ and artist–scholars’ teleological explanations of their work, and is also at stake in assessing practice-as-research. However, choreography’s creative character also presents a challenge to accounts of practical knowledge based on routinized, rule-governed action, a challenge which might be met by looking beyond technical conceptions of dance making towards the Aristotelian notion of phronesis (practical wisdom). This enables an understanding of choreographic knowledge as a form of phronetic insight, involving augmented awareness of the making process and of the quality of the inter-personal relationships it implies.

Susan Melrose revises an earlier chapter published in the first edition of this volume, concerned with expert-intuitive decision-making in choreographic practices, and the difficult task of the researcher–writer who seeks to enquire into and acknowledge these. The present revision was vital for two main reasons. First, Rosemary Butcher, who provided Melrose with many of the bases for writing about the artist–philosopher at work, died in July 2016, a matter of months after her work was celebrated with a retrospective in Berlin, and before she, researcher Stefanie Sachsenmaier and Susan Melrose could complete the full details of a major research undertaking concerned with the role of time and memory in her creative invention. The chapter aims to honour her work, not least her work as a searcher in art as well as a researcher. Secondly, whereas ‘intuition’ received relatively little sustained research enquiry in the later years of the twentieth century, for reasons that are outlined by Tony Bastick in Intuition: Evaluating the Construct and Its Impact on Creative Thinking (2003), interest has burgeoned in the first decades of the twenty-first century, in part because it has become clear, in Professional Studies, that the role of intuitive process in expert or professional decision-making is fundamental and can be determinant. Curiously enough, as Melrose demonstrates in this chapter, neither expertise or expert-intuitive process, nor the deliberative processes that constitute the second of ‘dual process theories of cognition’, have received much attention in research in the Performing Arts (although a very welcome exception is provided by researchers in Music).

In Chapter 3, Susan Leigh Foster demonstrates an intertextual methodology that expands knowledge. She contributes to our understanding of how dance can propose a theory concerning gendered identity – how it offers to participants and viewers a conception of what gender might be and how it works. Moving alongside the many dance scholars, including Foster herself, who have argued for consideration of the gendered significance of dancing, this chapter evaluates gender’s workings and effects in globalized culture, in a moment where popular images of femininity from Hollywood to Bollywood circulate rapidly through diverse mediatized formats. The focus of her inquiry is two works, one by British choreographer Lea Anderson and the other by the Japanese performance collective KATHY, that draw upon images from Hollywood films to mount powerful critiques of contemporary femininity. In order to situate their arguments concerning gender, she examines two canonical works by US choreographers Martha Graham and Trisha Brown. Emblematic of key moments in the history of dance modernism, their theorizations of gender provide historical perspective on the contemporary choreographic practices of Anderson and KATHY.

Chapter 4, by Bojana Cvejic´, draws on discussions in dance and performance studies as well as continental philosophy (Deleuze, Spinoza, Bergson et cetera) which were examined more fully in her book Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (2015). The essay accounts for a distinctive kind of thought, born in and through the very matter of choreographic creation, which characterizes the emergence of a new generation of choreographers in Europe in the past two decades. The notion of ‘choreographic problem’ rearticulates, both on philosophical and practical dramaturgical grounds, what she argues has been erroneously referred to as ‘conceptual dance’ in criticism in Europe since the mid-1990s. Cvejic´ argues that this approach has thoroughly transformed choreography and performance by reinventing performed relations between the body, movement and time under the theme of ‘problems’. The practice of this thought is rooted in the problematization of specific concerns within contemporary theatre dance, such as the body-movement bind with respect to expression and form, improvisation and processuality or spectatorship. Most importantly, its forte lies in introducing a method of creation by way of problem-posing, which merits philosophical attention.

Finally, in Chapter 5, Ben Spatz introduces the basic premises of social epistemology and shows how they can be applied to embodied practices like dance. Building on the epistemology of practice outlined in Spatz’s book What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015), it demonstrates how distinctions between practice, technique, and the epistemic can be borrowed from studies of laboratory science and used to articulate the research dimensions of choreography. The chapter examines three very different examples of research choreography – across pedagogy, dance and theatre – using them to build a conceptual toolkit that will be of use to artists, scholars and practitioner–researchers.

References

Bastick, Tony (2003) Intuition: Evaluating the Construct and Its Impact on Creative Thinking, Kingston, Jamaica: Stoneman and Lang.

Carr, David (1978) ‘Practical reasoning and knowing how’, Journal of Human Movement Studies, 4: 3–20.

——— (1984) ‘Dance education, skill and behavioural objectives’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 18: 67–76.

——— (1999) ‘Further reflections on practical knowledge and dance a decade on’, in G. McFee (ed.) Dance, Education and Philosophy, Oxford: Meyer & Meyer Sport.

Cvejic´, Bojana (2015) Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ryle, Gilbert (1963) The Concept of Mind, 2nd edn., Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Spatz, Ben (2015) What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, London and New York: Routledge.

Further reading

Bales, Melanie and Eliot, Karen (2013) Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies, OUP.

Bleeker, Maaike, Sherman, Jon Foley and Nedelkopoulou, Eirini (2015) Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, New York and London: Routledge.

Brandstetter, Gabriele (2015) Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burt, Ramsay (2016) Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cools, Guy (2016) Imaginative Bodies: Dialogues in Performance Practices, Amsterdam: Valiz.

Foster, Susan L. (2011) Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance, London and NY: Routledge.

LaMothe, Kimerer L. (2015) Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lepecki, André (2016) Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, New York: Routledge.

Nichol, Charlotte and Uytterhoeven, Lise (2017) What Moves You? Shaping Your Dissertation in Dance, London: Routledge.

1 Knowing through dance-making

Choreography, practical knowledge and practice-as-research

Anna Pakes

What does choreography have to do with knowledge? Clearly, choreographic works and the processes historically or typically involved in making them are the sorts of things we can know something about. But does the practice of choreography itself exploit, develop or demonstrate particular kinds of knowledge? Is it a way – or series of ways – of knowing in its own right?

The relationship between knowledge and dance practice has been explored by philosophers interested in dance and its role in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Writers such as Best (1985, 1987a, 1987b), McFee (1992, 1994), Carr (1984, 1987a, 1999) and Redfern (1982, 1983) are keen to assert the legitimacy and value of dance within educational curricula, and therefore emphasise how the practice of performance and choreography contribute to the pupil’s understanding of the art form in general. They also (particularly Best and McFee) make a case for dance playing a role in emotional education – in developing students’ understanding of life issues through the refined insight which engagement with dance works promotes. Much of this writing highlights the cognitive processes involved in making, performing and watching dance – clarifying the contribution dance can make to cognitive development. A clear connection between choreography and particular kinds or domains of knowledge is thus revealed.

More recently, debates about practice as research have again rendered urgent questions about choreography’s epistemology.¹ If research (at least at higher degree level and beyond) is the generation of new knowledge, then treating dance practice as a form of research raises important epistemological issues. What kind of knowledge do choreography and performance generate? Is this knowledge specifically about the practice of dance, or also other domains? How does dance practice develop original insight, and how is this disseminated and shared? Unless we can identify the choreographer-researcher’s claim to knowledge, it remains difficult to maintain that choreographic research has equivalent status with other, more traditional forms of scholarly enquiry. Within the broader university environment, the value of choreographic research also seems (at least partly) to hinge on whether it generates a distinctive form of knowledge, one that is not available by other means.

Western philosophy has traditionally conceived of knowledge as essentially ‘justified true belief’. This conception can be traced back at least as far as Plato’s Theaetetus and emphasises the importance of factual and theoretical knowledge over and above other forms. It is a conception of what it is to know which has intensified its hold with the ascendancy of positivist and scientistic forms of understanding in the modern world. One result is a contemporary situation in which ways of knowing that refuse or transcend the scientistic paradigm must often nonetheless be...