Dance curation as choreographic practice

Dance curators (or programmers, as they are often called) have a significant impact on the dance field throughtheir selection processes: elevating certain works, practices, and artists, while effectively excluding others. Through this, they have a considerable hand in shaping what kinds of dance pieces a local audience has access to,effectively writing dance history over time. But their working processes remain poorly understood, and there have been limited attempts to theorize their practice. This article begins with an exploration of the etymology of the term curator and the historical emergence of the curator in both the fine arts and dance. It then goes on to examine the role of the curator as mediator in two common models for dance presentation (the festival and the theater season) and explores two alternative curatorial models (the focus program at Brussels venue Beursschouwburg and the uncurated model of Amsterdam festival Come Together). Finally, it explores the practice of dance curation as a form of choreography itself. It concludes that contextualizing dance curation asa form of choreography could be an effective starting point for theorizing the practice, hopefully paving the way for further study.

Enabling (e)motion

This article discusses a practical exploration of the ability of a textile to meet with and affect bodies. It buildson the inherent ability of textiles, particularly in the form of a garment, to evoke movements and emotions. This paper suggests a shift in focus of the design of bodily materiality, towards an expression emerging from interactions connecting materiality and performativity. The findings are the result of 2.5 years of exploration,during which four performances, ten workshops, and four exhibitions were performed. The entwined parameters of expressing and informing are applied as a material choreographic thinking, which in this case results in a material choreography of openness, where expressing and informing are essential as entwined design parameters in the design of body-material interactions. The material choreography is developed as a method for addressing somatic experience, with improvements in terms of wellbeing and presence as aesthetic goals, focusing on reducing movements and emotions relating to stress for people suffering from chronic fatiguesyndrome.

A Letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein

Lynda Gaudreau’s current artistic research on asynchrony emerged from her choreographic practice. Asynchrony is the modification or disturbance of perception caused by a slight change in space and/or time within a work, and which, like a pebble, slips inside a machinery. This tiny friction between space and time heightens the audience’s attention. During her doctoral research (2018), she elaborated her conception of asynchrony through specific parameters, such as the hole/ gap, short circuit and fake space. These were organized into three dynamic axes: desynchronization, destruction, and editing. Her project eventually took the form of twenty-five fictional letters to various individuals - artists, thinkers and characters. They include letters to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cedric Price, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and a Sainte. The letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the unpublished letters of this project. Begun during the live screening of the American presidential election in 2016, the letter integrates various recollections and texts about space, movement and time. It carries the reader into a choreographic and asynchronic experience, from one place to another, and into different times (live stream, recorded…). The letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein is a reflective enquiry into the relation between space and language, and the mobile nature of both.

Holding the space: Choreography, architecture and urban heritage

This article responds to the interdisciplinary developments that choreography has undergone in the twenty-first century, in terms of a focus on relationships between dance, architecture, site and cultural heritage. It makes a claim for how choreography within the city manifests itself in the form of a public bodily act, as artistic boundary-crosser and socio-political agent. We explore this through the lens of a central case study: artist Anton Mirto’s Scaffolding (2019), a workshop-performance event for seven dancers sited within The Chapel of Many, an architectural installation by architect Sebastian Hicks and set inside the ruins of Coventry Cathedral (UK) as part of the Coventry Welcomes Festival’s Refugee Week. Grounded in an exploration of dance and architecture in terms of spatiotemporal relations following Rachel Sara’s (2015) framework of a transontology of architecture and dance and Rachel Hann’s (2019) concept of fast architecture, we argue for how the choreographic process of making Scaffolding speaks back to both the architectural space and the urban heritage site in which it is located and addresses a certain experience of temporality, history and memory. In turn, the potential political agency of such a performed conversation between architecture and choreography in the twenty-first century city is revealed.

Towards astroembodied choreostructions: Deviating from choreographing to choreoreading

In this article, I introduce the notion of choreostruction, which has emerged during my doctoral research projectChoreography as Reading Practice in the Performing Arts Research Centre at the University of the Arts, Helsinki (2013–2019). The term stems from studying the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy’s notion struction, which heexamines in depth in dialogue with the French astrophysicist and philosopher Aurélien Barrau in the book What’s these Worlds Coming to? (2015). In the book, the concept of struction is introduced as one of the concepts that could help us understand how “ we are not living in one world but worlds” , and how we “ no longer create, but appropriate and montage” (quotes from the book cover). I approach the notion and its operative potential by exposing one experimental choreographic work that I am still processing and in which the operative move in my choreographic practice from composition to attention is one important shift that connects my practice to the notion of struction. The term choreostruction is an attempt to materialize the dialogue between my artistic practice and my understanding of Nancy’s notion of struction. Other influencing references of this process come from the writings of philosophers Thomas Nail and Jaana Parviainen and artworks from the history of site-specific art.

Editorial

Editorial for the special issue Choreography Now

Between and within choreographies: An early choreographic object by William Forsythe

In 1990, William Forsythe created The Books of Groningen – Book N(7), an installation commissioned by the Dutch city of Groningen and architect Daniel Libeskind. This early choreographic object is composed of a water canal, a series of willow trees pulled by wires in order to grow in arched shape and a bush hedge. At a time of marked interest in expanded choreography as it develops in conjunction with choreography’s links to visual art, as well as in choreographic history, this article considers Book N(7) in relation with diverse historical conceptions of choreography – as dance-making, as an organisation of moving bodies, as notation and pre/scription. This analysis shows that the installation negates certain aspects of choreographic history while exemplifying and perpetuating others, therefore situating itself between different historical construals of choreography. At the same time, it points to the ways in which Book N(7) defies the possibility both of complete ruptures and of smooth continuities with the choreographic past, engaging in a negotiation which reworks this past in the present. Framing this analysis of The Books of Groningen – Book N(7) by references to certain of Forsythe’s ulterior works, this article presents the installation as a part of the artist’s longlasting, shifting engagements with the notion and history of choreography.