The Passion That Moves Me: An Investigation into the Body-Mind Connection of Middle Eastern Dancers (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sarco-Thomas ‘This is really beautiful’ Dance Fields Conference 19 April.pdf
Asking ‘where are we now?’ this paper charts the choreographic process of four contemporary dance artists creating new work in relation to the theme of 21st Century identities. Case studies of work by UK and EU-based artists Avatâra Ayuso, Roberto Olivan, and Máté Mészáros & Nóra Horváth are examined in relation to historical influences, devising processes and directorial choices taken in an intensive rehearsal period with third year Bachelors of Dance Studies students at the University of Malta’s School of Performing Arts for an international tour in Malta and the UK. Building on sociologist Rudi Laermans’ (2015) suggestion that contemporary dance is itself a collective activity characterized by works in which artistic cooperation leads to performance product, the study asks how intensive short-term artistic projects can illustrate small but noteworthy shifts in perceptions of selfhood for performers, choreographers and audience. It investigates how choreographing can become a strategic vehicle for discovering possible actions and interactions via ‘management of possibilities’ (Foucault 2002: 341) within dancers’ identity, and as such becomes an exercise of power (Laermans 2008) to varying degrees. The study invites reflection on three key elements: first, the approaches of these early and mid-career choreographers in relation to their histories and experiences working with established European artists Shobana Jeyasingh, Anne Teresa de Keersmaker and Wim Vandekeybus. Secondly, it analyses the impact of the working process in relation to the sense of identity experienced by the dancers as performers-in-training; and a third aspect addresses audience response to the works. Studio-based observation and notation within the creation period, semi-structured interviews with choreographers and dancers, and post-performance discussions offer opportunities for data collection. In short, the paper seeks to critically illuminate what is ‘really beautiful’ about dancing for a key sample of people who continue to follow, perform and shape contemporary dance in the 21st Century.
Performance Paradigm, 2017
This issue of Performance Paradigm, focusing on “Performance, Choreography and the Gallery,” takes the 2016 Biennale of Sydney (BoS20) as a starting point. The Biennale featured scores of performances that ranged across of a variety of genres (one-to-one, live art, theatre, dance, opera, installations, walks, talks, and tours) and a variety of sites (libraries, galleries, post-industrial halls, inner city streets, and harbour islands). The Biennale’s artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal and two of her ‘curatorial attachés’, Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, have been working at this intersection for years, along with curators such as Pierre Bal Blanc, Catherine Wood and Mathieu Copeland. So too have scholars such as Claire Bishop (2012; 2014), Shannon Jackson (2011), Amelia Jones (1998; 2012) and Susan Bennett (2009). We will not attempt a survey of that field here, suffice to say that the research presented in what follows refers to much of this seminal work. This collection of articles and artist pages seeks to engage with the performance dimension of a sprawling, international art event and related work outside the Biennale, along with the associated field of literature. The articles proceed primarily through female case studies such as Alex Martinis Roe, Shelley Lasica, Noa Eshkol, The Brown Council, Mette Edvardsen and Julie-Anne Long, and link the work of such artists to major themes circulating in this field. Of the many themes covered in this writing—including practice, choreography, labour, ethics, discipline, collaboration, visuality, power, spectatorship—we choose materiality, attention, agency, sensation and instability to frame this introduction.
2013
In The Intertwining-The Chiasm the philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) conceptualises the facticity of the world-as-lived in terms of an elemental but non material “flesh” to support his account of an intercorporeal transitivity that accords with how many dance artists consider the interrelationships upon which performances are founded. Yet the sense of a shared experience of the lived world that Merleau-Ponty describes, may in a contemporary context be felt to be unsustainable. In the years since his final text was written there has been increasing acknowledgement both of the differences between people and the problematic nature of ascribing universal principles and values to their lived experiences. Nevertheless, I will argue that it is particularly in the context of diversity and inequality that the potential of dance to engage people in embodied interactions becomes increasingly important. Drawing on my previous research amongst dance artists and reflections upon my own experiences -as a dancer, teacher, choreographer and co-creator –I will suggest that a dance event may be conceived as a site of intercorporeal interaction through which significance is negotiated. I will first revisit Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the ‘doubleness’ of embodied experience to explore his analysis of the interrelationships between self-other-world that provides for a breaking down of the binary oppositions between self-other, consciousness-world. This, I will argue accords with what dancers value in performance even while recognising the challenges of making and performing work in the context of difference and inequality. Noting what may be perceived as a lack of consideration of questions of inequality and difference in Merleau-Ponty’s text, I will then outline how his concept of flesh might be developed so that it is understood as being interlaced with the play of power relations. Drawing on developments of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in the fields of philosophical aesthetics, social philosophy and the philosophy of mind, I will then reconsider the reciprocal embodied experiences of creating, performing and being part of an audience to explore whether some current dance practices foster sensitivities and skills that provide for the capacity to negotiate across difference in ways that do not necessarily reinforce established normative relationships.
Alive or dead? Face to face with contemporary dance
Choreographic practices, 2016
At a time when artists are questioning twenty-first-century dance for its contemporary-ness, this writing exposes a tension that plays across differing choreographic processes-a tension that suggests a widening rift between letting go into collaborative uncertainty and the creation of single authored productions of spectacle. I suggest that a move away from spectacle in the United Kingdom is exacerbated by various wider themes such as practice as research, somatics, digital technology and neo-liberalism, all of which have deeply affected artists' performance processes. Particular emphasis is given to how shifts in institutionally driven dance training and education are affecting performance, and the writing draws attention to what artists might have in common across the divide-a passionate engagement with how we communicate what we do with others. This article elaborates a keynote address given at the conference Questioning the Contemporary in 21st Century British Dance Practices (Leeds, 2014). Rather than follow a rigorously referenced academic format, this writing continues the personal and polemical style of the conference keynote, with quotes and references existing alongside to provoke ideas and discussion.
‘"This is really beautiful": Un-Endangering Dancing Identities in 21st Century Performance'
Asking ‘where are we now?’ this paper charts the choreographic process of four contemporary dance artists creating new work in relation to the theme of 21st Century identities. Case studies of work by UK and EU-based artists Avatâra Ayuso, Roberto Olivan, and Máté Mészáros & Nóra Horváth are examined in relation to historical influences, devising processes and directorial choices taken in an intensive rehearsal period with third year Bachelors of Dance Studies students at the University of Malta’s School of Performing Arts for an international tour in Malta and the UK. Building on sociologist Rudi Laermans’ (2015) suggestion that contemporary dance is itself a collective activity characterized by works in which artistic cooperation leads to performance product, the study asks how intensive short-term artistic projects can illustrate small but noteworthy shifts in perceptions of selfhood for performers, choreographers and audience. It investigates how choreographing can become a strategic vehicle for discovering possible actions and interactions via ‘management of possibilities’ (Foucault 2002: 341) within dancers’ identity, and as such becomes an exercise of power (Laermans 2008) to varying degrees. The study invites reflection on three key elements: first, the approaches of these early and mid-career choreographers in relation to their histories and experiences working with established European artists Shobana Jeyasingh, Anne Teresa de Keersmaker and Wim Vandekeybus. Secondly, it analyses the impact of the working process in relation to the sense of identity experienced by the dancers as performers-in-training; and a third aspect addresses audience response to the works. Studio-based observation and notation within the creation period, semi-structured interviews with choreographers and dancers, and post-performance discussions offer opportunities for data collection. In short, the paper seeks to critically illuminate what is ‘really beautiful’ about dancing for a key sample of people who continue to follow, perform and shape contemporary dance in the 21st Century.
LandMark: Dance as a site of intertwining
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 2014
In the performance installation, LandMark (2011), dancers Deborah Saxon and Henry Montes and the visual artist Bruce Sharp explore both the facticity of human experience and the frailty of connections between people and between them and the world they inhabit. 1 I suggest their work may also be understood to probe the complexities of the interrelationships between consciousnessworld and self-other that are the focus of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's text, The Intertwining-The Chiasm (1968). His analysis of intercorporeality is particularly relevant to understanding the significance of the dancers' somatic investigations that inform their artistic practices. Further, by drawing on developments upon Merleau-Ponty's work in ecological aesthetics (Crowther, 1992) and social philosophy (Maclaren, 2002), I explore how the artists' creative practices may be understood to foster intercorporeal negotiations of significance. This is suggested to be of increasing importance within an intracultural context in which people have a complex variety of cultural experiences even while sharing in a national identity.