Choreography

Ideological inspiration

H.G. Gadamer’s parallelism between Art and Play (1960) has been a valuable inspiration to define the characteristics that the dance choreography should present. In a passage that also reflects Dewey’s ideas about Art as Experience (1934), the German philosopher compares Art to Aristotle’s Energeia (Metaphysics 1050a21-23), that is, a movement that fulfills his goal in itself (described by Aristotle as “telos echei”).  Being controlled by specific rules and structures that define its nature, Art is defined by its communicative and active nature, with the audience having the methodological privilege of giving meaning to the work by engaging with it. Performance is therefore central as representing the work of art itself, which is different than a more “static” product of art.

This idea of dynamic performance, that allows for communication with the audience and is still controlled by defined rules is what we aimed for in our performance.

State of the Art

Dance has been often described as a “mathematical” process, in which participants apply specific, predetermined rules to a set of object (Schaffer, 2013); dancer and choreographer T. Brown, amongst many, would start her creative process by deriving a set of rules that were complete enough to proceed with an improvisation. Also on the theme of audience involvement, there are multiple examples to be inspired by; these range from the more subtle way to involve viewers by reminding them of the passage of time and commemorating events through the use of archetypal figures and symbols, typical of choreographer M. Monk, to the more extreme experiments of the Grand Union (Foster, 1985). This theater/dance collective was known for their intermedia approach to performance as well as their focus on various narrative processes, employing alternative models of communication based on the audience’s participatory collaboration and showing the performance “in progress” instead of as a finished product. This resulted in the absence of hierarchical distinction between performers and audience (also defined as an “immobile gathering of performers”), giving viewers the possibility to watch both the story and its making thanks to the use of meta-commentary which clarified how individuals’ decisions contributed to the performance as a whole.

A characteristic of dance which is also fundamental for the current project is its ability to convey meaning. Besides the cases in which this was purposefully negated, such as the famous aleatory experiments of M. Cunningham and J. Cage, the meaning of gesture and its use in performance has been largely studied by choreographers (Cohan, 1989). In a similar way as poetry, however, one must be aware of the ambiguity and multiple meanings that can derive from this, due to the arbitrary connection between signifying (=meaning) and signifier (=movement). Using a linguistical metaphor, dance passages can be defined as “utterances” rather than sentences, as their meaning can only be inferred by the context (Hanna, 1983). In recent years, British academic and choreographer C. Bannerman has shown a very productive way to use this linguistic analogy, suggesting a list of symbolic devices to convey meaning[1] (2014).

How to deal with the Choreographic Base

Inspired by the creations mentioned above, our creative method would have to allow us to create a set of rules to control the choreography, but also to keep some aspects of the performance open to improvisation, or to be defined by the specific context. It was also our goal to explore the communicative power of gesture in its different ways to convey meaning, and to establish a dynamic relation between dance and music by “borrowing” the McNeill’s (1992) possible associations between language and gesture: Mimetic, Dialectic, Deictic.

In dealing with the choreographic base, it was clear that we would have to find a rule to select which information would guide the choreography for each passage/phrase, in order to avoid a too literal translation from music to movement as well as from the organist’s movements to the dancer’s movement; this would also allow the dancer to contribute to the performance with his/her own experience. After numerous experiments, it seemed logical to find the “rule” in the music-movement relationship, meaning that the type of link between the organist’s movement and the music (column 4 in the choreographic base), further defined as mimetic (= “normal” movement), dialectic (= “abnormal” movement) or deictic (= “abnormal” movement linked to a musical passage with a particular significance), would have to be preserved in the relationship between dancer’s movement and the totality of the musical performance.

In case of a mimetic relationship, the dancer would therefore have to move using the information in the choreographic base as “rules”: follow the subdivision of the musical cells and the musical “breathing”, represent the Vitality contours in their movement, also with the help of Bannerman’s symbolic devices, and use the movement graphs as indicators for the spatial dimension. On the other end, the dialectic relationship would allow him/her to “confront” these indications, and/or refer to the movement material from a previous section with slight modifications in order to convey a specific idea (i.e.: similar but bigger movement, opposite state of vitality etc…). Lastly, the deictic relationship would consist neither in “following” nor “criticizing” the choreographic base, but in the use of an “extraneous” movement, with the goal of breaking the normal flow of the performance in order to capture the audience’s attention in a particular moment.