Dis-Patch: Practice as. . . Practice and Research

Narodna umjetnost: hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2008

James Hamilton's book is the second book-length study of theater to have emerged from the Anglo-American aesthetics tradition. The first was Paul Thom's For an Audience (Temple University Press, 1993) whose last paragraph reads as follows: "Given that there can be an autonomous philosophy of the performing arts, the question is, What would such a philosophy be like? This question remains largely a matter for speculation" (p. 211). We need no longer speculate. Hamilton's contribution will hopefully be the first in a long stream of attempts to bring analytic reflection to bear on the conceptually evasive dimensions of performance. Hamilton unfolds a case for the aesthetic autonomy of performed theater. Performance, Hamilton claims, is not a mere addendum to the play, as Aristotle thought. Actors are not props through which a literary text can be vividly accessed. Theatrical performances are aesthetically independent (Part I). Hamilton believes that advocating such independence generates a problem. How does the audience identify a performance once it is dissociated from its links with a text? His reply (Part II) consists of showing how a performance can be understood without explicit or implicit ties to some text. If we are able to understand an evolving object, we can ipso facto delineate and refer to it; hence the mystery involved in identifying it is lifted. But understanding and identifying an object are conceptually distinct from responding to it as art. Hamilton accordingly turns to defend the aesthetic autonomy of performance (Part III). An aesthetic appreciation of performance involves (1) a perception of the performance against a background that determines whether the performance is an "achievement" and (2) a capacity to evaluate why the performance proceeded as it did, which in turn depends upon an imaginative reconstruction and evaluation of the choices shaping the creative process.

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.

2014

Within the last century, composers including John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Georges Aphergis or Michael Nyman, and movements such as the Futurists or later Fluxus have shown an increasing interest in a work’s performance itself and experimented with integrating performative and theatrical elements within their compositions in order to achieve a ‘theatricalisation of music’ (Kesting 1969). This focus on performances was preceded or paralleled within the theatrical arts and in a progression from dance to Dance Theatre, requiring actors and dancers to be increasingly creative and independent. Similarly, in this practice-based research the performer of a piece of instrumental music is regarded as a creative and independent source in addition to the composer. The research inquiry of this thesis is guided by the following three research questions: - How can performers of instrumental music be creative beyond the aural realisation of the score within a performative space? - With the performer’...

The documentation of dance regularly asserts a false concept. This is that dances can be fixed, like a text, script, painting or even a musical score. Dance academics and organizations like ballet companies and the trusts that claim to protect and preserve the heritage of specific choreographers protect this idea. Focused far more on outputs than production, they decontextualize dance by ignoring its context: the working process. Notwithstanding the problematics of this assumption about the archival form of such material, that the tokens of the types that Wollheim (1968) posits as necessary are simply too flexible to be captured as definitive, this in itself presents a creative opportunity. This paper posits this working process as played out in performance as well as the confines of rehearsal, and gives as a practical example the performance of a work by the same dancers across a thirty-year timeframe, presented alongside the original video material. For dancers and choreographers there is a more subtle process of evolution that occurs with the regular performance of a dance: the dance changes itself to suit its purposes, and this often renders the meaningfulness of documentation an academic (or more lately legal) exercise. Evidence for this can be found not only in the experience of dancers, but in the actions of choreographers dealing with their own works, even when they are considered classics. Dances, it seems, simply wear out unless they are subject to regular revision and a definitive version cannot be said to exist. This is not to say an account of a dance is impossible, but to suggest there are conditional features that need taking account of, and to question the artistic validity of ossified reproduction.

Performance Research Journal, 2004

Remembering folklore, staging contemporary dance.

2012

The dance production process is strongly influenced within the physical rehearsal space by social context factors and dynamics, such as intimacy of bodies, gender distribution, and the hierarchy of choreographers and dancers. Introducing online tools for asynchronous collaboration can change the traditional dance production process and impact the social dynamics of the group. We developed and deployed the Choreographer's Notebook, a web-based, collaborative, multi-modal annotation tool used in the creative process of making dance. We collected usage logs and choreographer reflections on the use of this tool, along with conducting interviews and focus groups, from the interdisciplinary perspectives of both technologists and choreographers involved in the project. We describe the socio-technical impacts of the Choreographer's Notebook based on the results of its usage in three dance productions. We analyze these case studies through various contextual lenses and provide a visualization of how the choreographic correction process evolved.

The creative potential and work of the performer in new music extends from the moment of conceptualising a concert to the moment of presenting it on stage and comprises many areas between and around those two points. In this thesis I explore the nature of this activity, from the act of playing itself to the commissioning and creating of new pieces, curatorial and collaborative tasks, and the actual concert presentation. I deliberately include interrelations between performer and music promoters, composers and the audience. This leads me to further areas of investigation, namely the question of the performer's leadership, the charismatic bond with the audience and the creation of what I call "concert aura". I do not strive to offer all-purpose formulae for the "perfect concert" or for the ideal collaboration.

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: Part I: Phenomenological Perspectives on Aesthetics and Art, 2023

The aesthetic unity of dancer and dance is a unique phenomenon in the art world. In exploring the nature and consequences of the aesthetic unity, this chapter first focuses on a dancer's and an audience's experience of dance, pointing out in the process an affective difference and a difference evident in an audience's recognition of technical virtuosity. The chapter then turns to writings of writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag and of eminent choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham, and to those of Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown and world-renown choreographer Pina Bausch, all of which describe in different ways the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance, ways that heighten understandings of dance, its uniqueness in the world of art, and its challenges. The well-known ending line from Yeats's poem "Among School Children"-"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"epitomizes just such a range of perspectives. The temporal awareness that runs like an undercurrent through the perspectives centers on the fleeting "nowness" of dance, its existential impermanence, hence the temporal unity of dancer and dance, and the temporality of movement itself, both of which are major factors in the challenge of preserving the art of dance. The chapter shows how this challenge may explain wayward phenomenological assessments and understandings of movement and of being a body, hence wayward phenomenological assessments and understandings of the aesthetic realities of dance and of dancing the dance, and more particularly the phenomenological neglect or faulty assessment and understanding of the sensory modality of kinesthesia. The writings of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, and of various present-day phenomenologists such as Gallagher and Zahavi are of particular concern in this regard. Of contrasting concern are the highly informative and indeed edifying first-person experiential writings of notably famous choreographers/dancers Doris Humphrey and Merce Cunningham that highlight the centrality of kinesthesia to life as well as to dance, of notably famous theater directors Jacques Lecoq and Stanton Garner, and of music composer Roger Sessions, all three of whom write pointedly, experientially, and in thought-provoking ways of the centrality of movement to their art, in no way diminishing the uniqueness of the art of dance but both documenting and broadening the relevance of movement to aesthetic creativity.