Revisiting "No to spectacle": self unfinished and Véronique Doisneau.

This essay presents readings of Jérôme Bel's 'Veronique Doisneau' and Xavier Le Roy's 'Self Unfinished' that examines the social and political implications of their use of experimental artistic strategies. It places these in the context of recent discussions of relational aesthetics and of Adorno's discussion of the inhuman.This is the authors version of the article. The version of record can be found in Forum Modernes Theater, 23 (1), pp. 49-59

Elroy Josephs and the hidden history of Black British Dance

This chapter gives a brief overview of the career of the black British dance artist and teacher Elroy Josephs and reflects on the reasons for his relative obscurity. Josephs danced with Les Ballets Nègres in 1952. From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, he appeared on stage and screen as a dancer, and sometimes actor, in Britain. In the early 1970s, in Camden, he started a community dance project and was appointed as one of the Greater London Arts Association’s (GLAA) first dance animateurs. In 1979 he became the first black lecturer in dance in British higher education teaching at IM Marsh in Liverpool, subsequently part of Liverpool John Moores University. In 1993 he chaired an event “What is Black Dance in Britain?” There are largely unwritten assumptions about the British dance history narrative in which black British artists are largely marginalized. Josephs specialized in jazz dance, and spent his later years working away from the metropolitan center. By offering an overview of Josephs’s career, this paper raises questions about how the de facto canon of British dance history can become more diverse and inclusive

Revisiting Plato's Chair: writing and embodying collective memory.

As a provocation, the review I wrote of Plato's Chair in 1985 evaluated Rose English's performance as a piece of dance. By doing so, it implicitly claimed that the words of English's monologue were not as important as the fact that it was improvised and that the performance foregrounded the corporeality of English's presence. What I actually wrote became key, earlier this year, to my remembering the work as part of the 'NOTES on a return' project. There is I believe a tension between the mostly verbal, archival traces of Plato's Chair and those physical aspects of its performance that largely escape the written record because they are embodied experiences that are hard to document and preserve. As critic and historian Ann Daly has wryly observed, the dance works that survive are the ones that have been written about, and this may perhaps prove to be true of Plato's Chair. However performances that draw on those aspects of a radical tradition that are least amenable to preservation can nevertheless transmit communal memories, histories and values -- that may be to some extent unofficial -- from one generation or group to another. Philosopher Maurice Halbwachs argued that recollection of memory is always a social process; there is no individual memory that is not also, in some way, part of the memories that we share with those with whom we are connected. Through reflecting on the written and embodied memories of Rose English's Plato's Chair, this paper considers what kinds of histories and values its recollection transmits

Chapter 12 Timeline of significant events 1946–2005 for British-based dancers who are Black

British Dance, Black Routes is an outstanding collection of writings which re-reads the achievements of Black British dance artists, and places them within a broad historical, cultural and artistic context. Until now discussion of choreography by Black dance practitioners has been dominated by the work of African-American artists, facilitated by the civil rights movement. But the work produced by Black British artists has in part been within the context of Britain’s colonial legacy. Ramsay Burt and Christy Adair bring together an array of leading scholars and practitioners to review the singularity and distinctiveness of the work of British-based dancers who are Black and its relation to the specificity of Black British experiences. From sub-Saharan West African and Caribbean dance forms to jazz and hip-hop, British Dance, Black Routes looks afresh at over five decades of artistic production to provide an unparalleled resource for dance students and scholars

The East West binary and the burden of representation.

paper presented at Gdansk Dance Conference, "Asia and Europe – cross-cultural dialogues in theatre and dance” June 18th 2012In a 1990 article, ‘Black art and the burden of representation’, Kobena Mercer discusses general expectations about the work of artists of colour. Critics and spectators in Europe and North America, he argues, invariably assume that the work of black artists always ‘represents’ Black identities or addresses the concerns of the Black community. This paper examines the conditions that determine when, in choreography and performance, dancers are or are not required to carry this ‘burden of representation’, focusing in particular on European attitudes towards dancers of Asian origin. It does this through discussions of five recent dance works: Gustavia by Matthilde Monnier and Maria La Ribot; Cheap Lecture and Cow Piece by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion; Zero Degrees by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; and Pichet Klunchun and Myself by Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun. Each of these pieces are performed by two dancers of the same gender and, compared with the love narrative of a conventional ballet pas de deux, each work seems to explore a social relationship. In most of these pieces, a friendship seems to bridge the dancers’ different backgrounds. Burrows is a dancer and choreographer while Fargion is a composer; La Ribot’s work lies in the ambiguous space between experimental dance and Live Art while Monnier is one of France’s leading contemporary dance choreographers; Khan is a British Asian dancer and choreographer while Cherkaoui is Belgian, from a Moroccan family, and is a long term member of the Belgian company Ballets C de la B. In Pichet Klunchun and Myself the differences between Bel and Klunchun are presented in a way that makes this bridging difficult. Bel is French with a similar background to La Ribot while Klunchun, from Thailand, has trained in the Thai Court Ballet style ‘Khon’, and is pioneering contemporary Thai dance. Part of the appeal of Burrows and Fargion’s pieces is the way each performer seems to allow the other a space in which to be different while at the same time working closely together. Something similar occurs with both Monnier and La Ribot, and with Khan and Cherkaoui. Bel and Klunchun, however, are more like adversaries, and the dramaturgy of their piece seems to place the burden of representing Thai dance on Klunchun, while Bel seems only to represent his own, idiosyncratic approach to conceptually-oriented European dance. It thus reinforces the idea of a binary split between Europe and Asia. In Zero Degrees, the problem of this split is presented through Khan himself who recounts, during the piece, his own semi-autobiographical experiences of vulnerability as a western born, educated young man on a journey between Bangladesh and India. Cherkaoui, who like Khan was born in Europe to a family with an Islamic background, and who shares with Khan a love of Sufi poetry and music, seems in the piece to play the role of sympathetic fellow witness. While Khan and Cherkaoui escape the burden of representation, Bel and Klunchun are unable to escape appearing to be on opposite sides of an ideologically constructed binary with its accompanying unequal power relations. Because what is at issue here is both personal and political, this paper uses postcolonial theory and recent discussions of ethics and relationality to examine the conditions of possibility for escaping the burden of representation

Cynical Parrhesia And Contemporary European Dance

This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s discussion of the concept of cynical parrhesia to explore some similarities between the kind of provocative dialogue practised by the Cynics and the provocative way in which some recent European contemporary dance pieces criticise contem- porary dance as an institution. It focuses on one ancient and one modern, twenty-first century example of provocative dialogue: the meeting between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, and that between gallery visitors and dancers in Production (2010) by Xavier Le Roy and Ma° rten Spa° ngberg in response to an invitation to create a work for exhibition in an art gallery. The purpose of provoca- tive dialogue, Foucault argues, is not to make someone to accept the truth but to persuade them to internalise the voice of the provocateur and thus initiate within themselves a process of ethical self-criticism. This paper argues that Production offers opportunities for this ethical practice both to gallery visitors and to the institution that commissioned it

Traversées transgressives des frontières: genre, ‘race’ et sexualité dans la chorégraphie contemporaine des années 1970

Cet article explore les intersections entre les discours normatifs sur genre, ‘race’ et sexualité qui entrent en jeu dans la mise en scène des masculinités par des danseurs professionnels. Il le fait à travers l’analyse de deux versions d’une pièce de danse contemporaine à succès, Troy Game de Robert North : la production originale présentée à Londres à partir de 1974 et sa reprise en 1979 aux États-Unis. Chaque production a créé une tension autour des limites des identités masculines normatives. L’article explore ces tensions à partir des réflexions de Michel Foucault sur la transgression et de Stuart Hall sur les impératifs sociaux qui visent à restaurer l’ordre et à contrôler les frontières à l’intérieur des systèmes de classification

Women performing masculine clumsiness

This paper discusses Lea Anderson\'s 2004/5 revival of her 1989 piece Greetings as part of the programme Double Take. Greetings, which draws on imagery from the Marx Brothers, Morecambe and Wise and other male comedy acts, takes a humorous look at the way male bonding takes place through the way men greet one another. When initially performed in 1989 by two men, one of whom was an untrained and unskilful dancer, part of its humour depended on expansive male clumsiness. Its humour gently hints at the lenient way in which society excuses most men for failing to live up to what is in effect an unattainable masculine ideal. Its later revival by women dancers complicates what had initially been a relatively straightforward, if critical examination of the performance of masculinity. By doing so it created a humorous space in which it became temporally possible for women dancers to escape social norms and perform alternative identities

Rudolf Laban and the ‘Yorkshire Connection’

A discussion of the early German modern dance pioneer Rudolf Laban's work in Laban in the 1940s and 50s in developing dance teaching in the the region

Avoiding Capture

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This essay discusses three recent British contemporary dance works that radically rework the spatial relation between audience and performer. These are: Nicola Conibere’s Assembly (2013), Katye Coe’s (To) Constantly Vent (2014), and Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small’s Voodoo (2017). The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre theorisation of the social and political production of space to analyse the kinds of reworkings of space time that these works enact. It argues that the works evade capture by the apparatuses that maintain normative ideologies, not only those governing the reception of art but also the apparatuses of racial classification