Time as a strand of the dance medium

Time and space are at the core of our aesthetic experiences of dance performances, yet dance has been frequently categorised as a space-based art. In this paper I revise the choreological perspective developed by Preston-Dunlop and Sánchez-Colberg that conceives dance as an embodied performative art articulated in a multistranded medium (performer, movement, sound, space). I argue that time should be allowed a distinct place in the choreological discourse since its presence is key to the expressivity of a dance piece. I conceptualise the meaning of the time strand and expose how different substrands emerge, connect with others and become expressive in dance performances. My investigation considers in particular the aesthetics of time in live performances in the theatre compared to dances created for the camera, focusing specifically on instances of contemporary transpositions from one context to the other

The Speed Of Queer: La La La Human Steps and Queer Perceptions of the Body

In this article, Stephen Low argues that Edouard Lock’s choreography for La La La Human Steps embodies temporalities that expose how the normative experience of time determines and limits our visual and theoretical perceptions of the gendered body. Focusing on movement executed at hyper-fast virtuosic speeds seen in La La La Human Steps’ recent work Untitled , Lock’s choreography demonstrates possibilities of corporeal transformations through the way the body is perceived in time through movement. The analysis of Lock’s choreography expands the theories of queer time elucidated by Judith Halberstam in her book In A Queer Time and Place beyond temporalities defined by non- normative life schedules to include non-normative temporalities determined by how subjects move in and through time. Furthermore, the examination of the effects of hyper-fast movement exposes how Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity remains contingent on normative temporalities that allow the body to be seen as gendered in a stable and coherent manner. The aesthetic of speed embodied by Lock’s choreography is acknowledged to be both simultaneously destructive, in that it undoes the stability and coherency of gender as ascertainable by the act of seeing the body, and generative, in that it offers modes of challenging gender norms that do not require medical technologies. In other words, through an aesthetic that employs virtuosic speed, Lock offers a concept of queer temporality that allows a subject to embody the trans in “transgender.”Dans cet article, Stephen Low soutient que les chorégraphies d’Edouard Lock pour La La La Human Steps incarnent des temporalités qui font voir comment l’expérience normative du temps détermine et limite nos perceptions visuelles et théoriques du corps genré. Les chorégraphies de Lock reposent sur des mouvements exécutés à des vitesses vertigineuses et virtuoses telles qu’illustrées dans Untitled , une production récente de La La La Human Steps qui montre des possibilités de transformation corporelle par la façon dont le corps est perçu dans le temps à travers le mouvement. L’analyse de la chorégraphie de Lock prolonge les théories de «!temps queer » proposées par Judith Halberstam dans In A Queer Time and Place au-delà des temporalités définies par des horaires de vie non normatifs pour inclure des temporalités non normatives déterminées par la façon dont les sujets se déplacent dans et à travers le temps. Qui plus est, l’examen des effets du mouvement hyperrapide démontre à quel point la théorie de la performativité du genre de Judith Butler demeure tributaire des temporalités normatives qui permettent au corps d’ être vu comme genré de manière stable et cohérente. L’esthétique de la vitesse incarnée par la chorégraphie de Lock est reconnue comme étant à la fois destructrice, en ce qu’elle mine la stabilité et la cohérence du genre vérifiables par la seule action de voir le corps, et génératrice, en ce qu’elle propose des moyens de contester les normes liées au genre sans recourir à des technologies médicales. Autrement dit, Lock propose, au moyen d’une esthétique qui emploie une vitesse virtuose, une perception de la temporalité queer qui permet au sujet d’incarner le trans- dans «!transgenre!»

Expanded Choreographies - Choreographic Histories

From objects to sounds, choreography is expanding beyond dance and human bodies in motion. This book offers one of the rare systematic investigations of expanded choreography as it develops in contemporaneity, and is the first to consider expanded choreography from a trans-historical perspective. Through case studies on different periods of European dance history - ranging from Renaissance dance to William Forsythe's choreographic objects and from Baroque court ballets to digital choreographies - it traces a journey of choreography as a practice transcending its sole association with dancing, moving, human bodies

Friday dinner

Friday Dinner is a dance performance interlacing the aesthetics of both trained technical movements often taught in institutions, and gestural movements true and natural to a dancer’s body. As a dancer trained in several codified forms, I am interested in the expressive range of patterns we absorb from formal practice, and the gestures and movement we manifest in our everyday lives. Using videotaped footage of dancers enjoying dinner, exchanging casual conversations and sharing childhood memories, we extracted natural gestural movement from the dancer’s bodies. These idiosyncratic gestures were then layered with refined, established dance movement often found in dance institutions and academia. Heavily relying on recorded dinner settings and interviews, the work unravels a complexity of movement and virtuosity of presence, highlighting the aesthetics of both approaches while offering potential hybrids between these forms for contemporary performance

Expanded Choreographies - Choreographic Histories

From objects to sounds, choreography is expanding beyond dance and human bodies in motion. This book offers one of the rare systematic investigations of expanded choreography as it develops in contemporaneity, and is the first to consider expanded choreography from a trans-historical perspective. Through case studies on different periods of European dance history - ranging from Renaissance dance to William Forsythe's choreographic objects and from Baroque court ballets to digital choreographies - it traces a journey of choreography as a practice transcending its sole association with dancing, moving, human bodies

Expanded Choreographies – Choreographic Histories

From objects to sounds, choreography is expanding beyond dance and human bodies in motion. This book offers one of the rare systematic investigations of expanded choreography as it develops in contemporaneity, and is the first to consider expanded choreography from a trans-historical perspective. Through case studies on different periods of European dance history – ranging from Renaissance dance to William Forsythe's choreographic objects and from Baroque court ballets to digital choreographies – it traces a journey of choreography as a practice transcending its sole association with dancing, moving, human bodies

British Dance and the African Diasporas, the Discourses of Theatrical Dance and the Art of Choreography: 1985 to 2005

The aim of this thesis is to devise a theoretical approach to writing histories of theatrical dance, which draws on African and Diaspora forms. Most choreographers who work with these forms in Britain are usually of African or Caribbean descent and are racially black. I call the theoretical approach the choreosteme. I use the theoretical approach to historicise some of the developments that take place in dance as an industry in Britain and I design it to address issues of discourse, representation and cultural politics. My interest is in investigating the historical debates about the definition about the work of black choreographers in Britain especially those who draw on African and Diaspora forms. The choreosteme is based on social constructionism, Michel Foucault’s notion of the episteme, Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s conception of African aesthetics and the analytic tool called the chronotope, which I have borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin. I devise the theoretical approach in chapters 2 and 3 and I write five micro-histories about dance artists using this approach in chapters 4 to 8. In chapter 4, I discuss the construction of the Black dance/African Peoples’ Dance sector in 1993 following the debates about the nature of black dance in Britain. In chapter 5, I will look at the various means by which dance artists and managers tried to generate a critical discourse for their work and explain how the dominant discourses emanating from larger organisations rendered much of their work invisible. In chapter 6, I write about dance artists who were based in London and working as dancers and teachers (amongst other things) between 1994 and 2005. I discuss how they developed their dance practices through research and formal study at a time there was little formal training for the kind of practices they were interested in. They are Hopal Romans, Paradigmz, Ukachi Akalawu, Sheba Montserrat and Diane Alison-Mitchell. Chapter 7 is about two choreographers: Sheron Wray and Robert Hylton. I also discuss and analyse the idea of choreographic fusion in this chapter. Choreographer Beverley Glean is the focus of chapter 8. The chapter 9 is the conclusion

Intertextuality and Identity: An Examination of Dramaturgy for Dance Through the Remounting Process

This research thesis focuses on remounting existing dance choreographies. It reveals a shift from traditional notions of the choreographer as a figure of centralized authority to a decentralized model of collaborative exploration. Questions raised throughout this investigation are: How are the outcomes of choreographic remounting affected by defining the place of imitation in the process? How can the artist's creative voice remain present and active in the context of executing already established choreography? What is the place of the dancer's adaptive choices, and how do they manifest in the remounting process and subsequent performance of the work? Three phases are identified in order to contextualize these questions within the remounting process. The three phases are: Mimesis, Embodiment and Interpretation. The theoretical framework for this study comes from dance and performance studies, using references from Mark Franko, Bojana Cvejic, and William Forsythe