Alys Longley

Alys is a performance maker and researcher whose work moves between dance, theatre, performance writing and live art.
New Zealand °1978
affiliation: Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland
en

Alys’s research interests include practice-led research, interdisciplinary projects, ethnography, somatic practices, ecology and inclusive dance education. She has recently led the project fluid city, an art-science-education project on water-sustainability. Her book The Foreign Language of Motion was published in 2014 with Winchester University Press’s Preface Series and her book Radio Strainer was published in 2016.  Alys recently co-edited the book Undisciplining Dance through Cambridge Scholars Press with Carol Brown. 

research

research expositions

  • anti-anticipatory aesthetics (last edited: 2022) author(s): Alys Longley, pavleheidler This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    “anti-anticipatory aesthetic” names the experimental creative strategy that functions according to a principle similar to “act first, deduct later,” which–in itself–is an homage-of-sorts to Deborah Hay’s choreographic strategy “shoot, then aim.” the aim of “anti-anticipatory aesthetic” is to put observation at the centre of the creative process instead of anticipation.
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research expositions (collaborated)

  • the history project (working title) (last edited: 2022) author(s): pavleheidler, Alys Longley, Edvard Stokstad This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    My working hypothesis for the history project (working title) states that "the standard narrative timeline" is a work of fiction which–it being historically inaccurate–requires effort to maintain. "The standard narrative timeline" is what I call that version of dance history that all professionals trained in dance in the West will be somewhat familiar with. This version of dance history says that through selective criticism of existing standards modern dance developed "from" ballet, postmodern dance developed "from" modern dance, etc.
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comments

Exposition: Latitudinal Conversations (01/01/2013) by Don Asker
Alys Longley 20/01/2014 at 12:40

This submission documents a series of around one particular creative
process (Latitudinal Conversations as Praxis). This element of the submission
evokes thinking around artistic research in relation to place, and the interplay
between space, choreography and embodiment in generating knowledge.
Discussions on the creative project are accompanied by more general thoughts on
creative practice as knowledge and the contradictions, challenges and possibilities
embedded in it. I think this submission would be relevant to practitioners of
choreography, dance in education, somatic studies, practice led research and site specific work.

This exposition has great intellectual potential in its combination of specific and
general thinking around practice-led research. This article follows a meandering style wherein different registers of writing move beside and across each other. It is an innovative exposition in terms of its format – combining multiple registers of writing and media in a consideration of practice-led choreographic research.

The research is contextualized by literature from a very wide net of writers from art,
somatics, philosophy, psychology, and qualitative research. New insights arise in the way it moves between a particular world of artistic praxis in relation to literature from a variety of contextual fields. Is the conversational nature of the project its method? I do find the ambiguity and porousness of this exposition endows this research with a poetic quality and a sense of looseness that enables a space of listening or tuning in my encounter with it. The artistic work it conveys through its latitudinal conversations, still and moving images, sound fragments and musings on creative research contain innovative textures and insights.