Choreography as philosophy, or exercising thought in performance

Following developments in contemporary European choreography, which have given rise to the controversial term ‘conceptual dance’, it has been claimed that certain contemporary choreographers are seen to be ‘conceptualising dance’. That is, they are producing new concepts of dance with their works, rather than producing works that (re)present ideas or concepts through choreographed dancing. Given such a context, this chapter explores the relations arising between choreographic practice and certain concepts drawn from the field of philosophy, or even between contemporary dance performance and the nature of theorising and philosophical thinking itself. The case of Jérôme Bel’s 'The Last Performance' (a lecture) (2004) is used to examine how and whether, as one explicitly invokes philosophy with/in their work (onstage, or within a performance setting), they speak to an economy of knowledge and are exercising a practice that are specific to performance-making, or also perhaps to those of philosophical thinking. The discussion is further developed through a consideration of propositions by Hélène Cixous (2010), as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994), on philosophy as a practice of producing concepts that is different to literature for example. Finally, it is suggested that, by examining the ways in which philosophical enquiry operates within choreographic practice, we are able to re-think how dance thinks, but also, potentially, to re-imagine philosophical thinking as choreography

A phantom in contemporary European choreography - What is Beckett doing to us dance-makers?:Can we do something to him in return? or, a series of realizations, three instances and an afterthought

After realising Beckett’s unquestionable presence in her choreographic work, F embarks on a journey whose aim is to identify the ways in which Beckett appears lately in contemporary choreography. The article focuses on choreographers Vera Mantero, Maguy Marin and Jérôme Bel and discusses their works and thinking in relation to several points on the work of Beckett raised by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Steven Connor and Jonathan Rée. In particular, F explores Mantero’s suggestion that with Beckett ‘thinking replaces talking’ alongside the choreographer’s question ‘what am I saying when I’m dancing?’ and her use of language and automatic writing when creating choreographic work. Furthermore, Marin’s reflections on her recent work Umwelt lead to a consideration of her views on the notion of exhaustion in Beckett, both as physical exhaustion of the human body and as in the exhaustion of possibilities via combinatorial mathematics. F then picks on Bel’s attempt to re-define theatre via the scene of Krapp listening to his tapes or eating his banana, in order to shed light on how such view of theatre allows Bel to arrive at a maximum of theatre via a minimum of action. Finally, F draws on her encounter and discussion with choreographer Xavier Le Roy, to highlight a sense of Beckett’s pervasive ‘everywhereness’ in contemporary choreography; such presence on the one hand appears as a preoccupation with structure and method, and with the notion of a philosophy of theatre, but on the other hand seems to resist any attempt to pin down what exactly it is and how it is really manifested. What emerges is a sense of the ‘very much Beckett’ and the ‘not at all Beckett’ appearing at the same time, so that Beckett’s presence is finally defined as that of a phantom who hasn’t appeared yet, but at the same time cannot cease appearing; F’s attempt proves justified, but is also in a way always bound to fail

Research through collaborative practice::identifying the principles of performance in Umm... I... and uh... [revisited]

In recent debates on the development of practice-led research, discussions have often focused on the relationship between the different modes of doing that the researcher-practitioner engages with, which often include collaborative practice and interdisciplinary activities. Within this context, this paper sets out to explore certain principles of performance that emerged, as part of the creative process and the performances of the solo work 'Umm… I… and uh… [revisited]', but also through reflections that I shared with performer-collaborator Susanna Recchia when the project was completed. It unfolds collaborative choreographic research through the articulation of the ‘performance principles’ of the work, which sustain, as I propose, a shared thinking between choreographer and performer, in a piece whereby the performer is given by the choreographer a series of written instructions or prompts that form the ‘performance score’. My practice is therefore presented here not only as multi-layered and complex in terms of its process, but also as shared amongst artists; Recchia in particular is staged as a parallel researcher with her own reflections on practice. Given that the main focus of this practice-led research concerns the performer’s relation to space, what follows is a meditation on a series of tasks through which a space for practising choreographic thought in writing is created. The tasks are four: ‘Go horizontal’. ‘Mark out the territory’. ‘Create a miniature’. ‘Find the new beauty’. Through them I propose not a style or way of choreographing, but a way of approaching the stage and therefore a way of opening out possibilities, a way of imagining and preserving what I am exploring as the space of the dance possible, in practice