‘Critical Pathways’ – Training and investigating the art of choreography-making with Rosemary Butcher

This article discusses the pedagogic practice of British choreographer Rosemary Butcher (1947–2016) with a particular focus on the ways she mentored dancers and choreographers as part of her self-curated workshop series Critical Pathways, programmed over a number of years at Independent Dance in London. Drawing on archive materials, personal research notes as well as practitioner interviews, the article draws out some of the idiosyncratic pathways of dance training that practitioners encountered as part of the series, and the ways these continue to influence their ongoing practice. The writing thematises Butcher’s signature use of language and conceptual tools for choreography-making, as well as her approach to teaching and mentoring dance practitioners, which was inextricably tied to her choreographic practice. Never seeming to settle on a formula that had worked before, there was an arguably timeless and endlessly adaptable inexhaustibility and curiosity to her approach to making that are key qualities of inventive practice. The article further discusses the ways that Butcher instigated processes of critical self-reflection and approaches to reinvention as part of a continual investigation into what dance and choreography might be

Ways of doing, ways of thinking, ways of moving together: considerations for cross-cultural encounters and exchanges in and through dance practice

In each of the encounters that were and continue to be facilitated through the project ArtsCross/Danscross, sets of relational agendas are being instigated, which tie into complex historical and current political as well as cultural entanglements between the countries of origin of the practitioners involved. In integrating dance practitioners from the cities of Beijing, London and Taipei, who work together towards publicly performed choreographic works, the project is set to involve processes of cultural translation between practitioners from specific places that bring with themselves equally specific ways of doing and thinking. In this article I extend my thinking around the issues arising from and within the cross-cultural encounters, building on a previously written chapter published in the co-edited collection Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures (Sachsenmaier in Colin and Sachsenmaier (eds.) 2016). More than bringing practitioners from different localities together to create dance works, the project ArtsCross/Danscross set up spaces of encounter of practitioners as well as practices as such – practices as established in varying ways of doing in different places. I discuss examples of choreographic practice with a focus on issues identified in the related fields of Global and Translation Studies, while arguing that these practices retain their own logic and ways of working, as well as producing ‘new forms of experience’, which are ‘extra-linguistic’

Chinese Definitions of the European –: Some Historical Examples

Der Artikel analysiert chinesische Europabilder während des . Jahrhunderts und des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Hierbei geht der Autor für den ersten Betrachtungszeitraum vor allem auf Meinungsbilder innerhalb christlicher Kreise ein. Für den zweiten Betrachtungszeitraum, insbesondere die 920er Jahre, werden vornehmlich Stimmen aus dem Lager entschiedener Modernisierer untersucht. Diese werden wiederum mit den Positionen chinesischer Denker verglichen, welche das Ziel einer kulturspezifischen, nachhaltigen Form der chinesischen Moderne vertraten. Unter anderem ergibt der diachrone Vergleich, dass im . Jahrhundert – selbst unter chinesischen Christen – positive Europabilder nach konfuzianischen Maßstäben bemessen waren. Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde die Relevanz des Konfuzianismus im Hinblick auf Europa nicht mehr vorausgesetzt, sondern vielmehr kritisch debattiert

Conceptions of Space in Global History –: A Brief Outlook on Research in the United States and China. A Widespread Research Field

Raumkonzepte in der Globalgeschichte – Ein kurzer Überblick zur Forschung in den USA und in China Der Aufsatz betrachtet neuere Entwicklungen in der Diskussion um Welt- und Globalgeschichte und verändert dabei gegenüber vielen westlichen Überblicken die Perspektive, indem er neben amerikanischen auch chinesische Beiträge zu dieser Debatte näher analysiert und zum Ausgangspunkt einer Erörterung der zugrunde liegenden Raumkonzete macht, die nicht nur den historischen Gegenstand sondern auch die historiografische Praxis in einem neuen Licht erscheinen lassen

Just in time: ‘momentary’ events in the making of Rosemary Butcher’s signature practices

The notions of ‘ephemerality’, of time and loss, are essentially spectatorial, in the case of live performance. For the performance-maker, the work of making “the work”, over time, has never been ephemeral. Spectators’ performances and those of makers are non-identical, not least in terms of performances’ times. The ‘signature practices’ of the mature expert practitioner tend to emerge just in time, and the work is serial, a momentary instantiation in an ongoing creative enquiry, whereas spectating, in the event, mistakes its experience for “the work itself”. We propose to argue that times, the immutable and the immanent, engage with particular ways of seeing, so as to produce ‘signature practices’, in expert performance-making registers. The processes tend to be punctuated a ‘momentary instantiation’ (Knorr Cetina, 2001): the timely performance outcome that seems initially to end the enquiry, but that will reveal, to the practitioner concerned, a further set of questions to be worked through

Just in time: Rosemary Butcher, making memories and marks

What is at stake in the relatively recent urge to document, annotate or archive decision-making processes in creative practices? Others have posed this sort of question (not least Derrida's Archive Fever, 1995), but, ironically enough, they tend to have done so through the written text—just as we are, in part, constrained to do here. Who or what has driven the historically specific urge to document—and who has benefited from it? Writer-researchers tend to be blissfully expert in the sorts of fields that collocate around performance decision-making—not least where university researcher holds sway. Yet surely what some of us may want—almost desperately—to capture, still evades that attempt at wording? What is it that holds centre-field, while researchers run around? Besides, what does the artist or maker really want? What do researchers want from ‘the artist’ when we use the words ’document’, ‘record’, ‘annotate’ and ‘archive’? When do we want it? Plainly Butcher has made the work, but ‘the work’, here, tends to signal the history of the made, rather less than the story of the making. In historical terms, most of Butcher's making processes pre-date this urge to document—except in her own mind, which bears their marks. What does Butcher remember? Perhaps her memories are the work's archive—hence, for whom do we archive, document and annotate, and how? In Derrida, concern was with time (in the beginning, in the end), and the command (do this! do that!), whereas what Butcher seems to recall is a series of questions, for which she continues to have few answers: the apparently simple ‘What was I doing then?’ signals an ongoing enquiry that image, writing and record fail to satisfy