Borrowing methods: what might creative practitioners in visual arts and dance learn from each other?

Abstract

Practitioners in different fields adopt disparage tools to produce work. Artists draw, photograph, walk, and use chance processes, amongst other methods. Dancers and choreographers have also drawn, used chance, and walked as well. Considering methods as essential tools to foster creativity, this talk addresses how artists in different fields may learn from each other’s processes of making. Focusing specifically in installation artists and choreographers, how might choreographic strategies be applied in visual arts? In the last five years, dance forms have taken over visual arts venues, in a tendency to show dance within exhibition settings (for instance, Tino Sehgal at Tate Modern and Documenta’13, Siobbhan Davies at ICA, and Alexandra Pirici at Venice Biennale). My research enquires how this tendency towards the choreographic impacts methodologies in visual arts, and how it may evolve in the next few years. Wayne McGregor sees choreography as a ‘process of physical thinking’ that operates in the mind and the body, developed through a collaborative cognitive process. Jonathan Burrows considers choreography as a process of choice and of arranging objects.1 Both approaches emphasize the methodological aspect of the term, and share principles with visual arts processes. This talk considers a translation of choreography as a method for the visual arts, as well as an understanding of its inherent implications in contemporary artistic practice. 1 J. Burrows, A Choreographer's Handbook, p.40