Folding and withholding: writing with and by choreographers

The impetus for the present research comes from questions that arose in projects of collaborative writing by the author with British-based choreographers Rosemary Lee, Kim Brandstrup and Rosemary Butcher. In these projects, the three choreographers differently attempted to word elements of their ongoing choreographic enquiries. The conviction was that such writing might participate in a choreographer's current choreographic research, rather than document research that had already unfolded in the creation of a performance work. The present research thus interrogates the philosophical implications of asking a choreographer for an account of how she or he works. With reference to recent studies in critical ethnography and ethics, the research proposes the development of practices of collaborative writing by a choreographer and a researcher-observer alert to the motivated and implicated positions of each. Included as appendix to the thesis is a book co-written with a choreographer and a CD-ROM of published collaborative writing and open interviews with Butcher, Brandstrup and Lee, performance documentation and journals of studio observation. Published instances of writing by other performance makers are additionally drawn into the enquiry as "research companions". Interrogating relations between writing and choreographers' creation processes, the overall research premise thus concerns the development of writing capable of articulating what matters to choreographers. This research addresses those choreographers who have hesitated when asked about how they work, and asks every dance scholar to hesitate before writing on or about dance-making

Between Precarity and Vitality: Downtown Dance in the 1990s

This dissertation examines experimental dance in New York City in the 1990s. Earlier periods of American concert dance have received significant scholarly attention to the historical, political, and aesthetic aspects of dance practice. Moreover, certain periods of modern dance — especially the 1930s and the 1960s — have been analyzed as moments of significant change, and the artists that emerged from the Judson Dance Theater in particular have held a significant place in the theorizing and historicizing of dance in the United States. However, experimental dance practices of the early 21st century demonstrate dramatically different aesthetics, approaches, and circumstances of production than those of earlier periods, including their Judson forebears. This project argues for understanding the 1990s as a period of significant change for dance, one with continuing resonance for the decades that follow.This project uses the term "downtown dance" to situate experimental dance in New York City as a community of practitioners, rather than as a particular set of aesthetic or artistic practices. Each of the four chapters focuses on an aspect in this period that would define how dance looked, how dancers practiced, and what shaped the artistic values and priorities of this community. The first chapter presents a history of the dance-service organization Movement Research. Tracing the history of the organization from its founding in 1978 through the establishment of its most influential programs in the 1990s — including the Movement Research Performance Journal and the performance series Movement Research at the Judson Church — the chapter locates Movement Research as a central entity in building the community and shaping theaesthetics of downtown dance. The second chapter examines the effects of the AIDS crisis on dance in the 1990s. As AIDS entered its second decade, it collided with and magnified downtown dance's complex relationship with emotion. This chapter draws on scholarship of AIDS' relationship to visual art, theater, and activism, as well as close readings of several works — by artists including Donna Uchizono, Neil Greenberg, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin, Jennifer Monson, and DD Dorvillier — most not generally understood as "AIDS dances," to argue that AIDS' impact generated a fundamental shift in the role of emotion in downtown dance. The third chapter examines how shifts in arts funding in the 1990s connected to a major restructuring in production models for dance. This chapter connects the history of the modern dance company with both aesthetic and economic developments over the course of the 20th century, arguing that the company should be understood as a combined economic-aesthetic system. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates the new model for dance production that began to take hold in the 1990s in the wake of widespread funding and economic shifts: the project model. Teasing out the complex web of funding for dance, this chapter makes extensive use of dance periodicals; several funding trend analyses from organizations including Dance/USA, National Endowment for the Arts, Dance/NYC, and private corporate and foundation reports; and the archives of the presenting institution Danspace Project. The final chapter looks at how the shifts in economic models for dance discussed in the previous chapter connected to changes in training and bodily technique of dancers and performers. Specifically investigating the history of "release technique," this chapter examines how attitudes toward technique and training in downtown dance in the 1990s shifted the connection between movement practices and creative output, reconceiving the role of the dancer in the dancer-choreographer relationship

Voice in Screenwriting: Discovering/Recovering an Australian Voice

This creative practice research explores the concept of an identifiable screenwriter’s voice from the perspective of screenwriting as craft, proposing that voice can be understood and described based on its particular characteristics. Voice is understood to be the authorial presence of the screenwriter, whose mind shapes every aspect of the text. This presence is inscribed in the text through the many choices the screenwriter makes. More than this, the research argues that the choices made inflect the text with a cultural-national worldview. This occurs because of the close association between voice and personal (including cultural/national) identity, and because of the power of textual elements to signify broader concepts, ideas and phenomena belonging to the actual world. The thesis includes an original feature film screenplay evidencing a particular Australian voice, and an exegesis which describes voice and national inflection more fully. The practice research began with the interrogation of voice in a previously-existing screenplay which, though an original work written by an Australian screenwriter – myself – was described as having an American voice. Voice and its mechanisms were then further investigated through the practice of writing the original screenplay, Calico Dreams. Theories of voice from within literary theory, and the concept of mind-reading, from cognitive literary theory, acted as departure points in understanding voice in screenwriting. Through such understanding a conceptual framework which can assist practitioners and others to locate aspects of voice within a screenplay, was designed. This framework is a major research outcome and its use is illustrated through the description of voice in the screenplay, Calico Dreams. The research found that screenwriter’s voice serves to unify and cohere the screenplay text as an aesthetic whole through its stylistic continuities and particularities. Through the voice, the screenwriter also defines many of the attributes and characteristics of the film-to-be. A theory of screenwriter’s voice significantly shifts the theoretical landscape for screenwriting at a time when an emerging discourse of screenwriting is developing which can enrich understandings of the relationship between the screenplay and its film