Choreographing Relations

"Choreographing Relations" undertakes the experiment of a conceptual site development of contemporary choreography by means of practical philosophy. Guided by the radically empiricist question "What Can Choreography Do?" the book investigates the performances of Antonia Baehr, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy, and Eszter Salamon, and the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It establishes a relation between these practitioners as an encounter in method, and develops method as a singular, material and experimental practice. In view of these singular methods and the participatory relations to which they give rise, Choreographing Relations offers a prolific inventory of arepresentational procedures that qualitatively transformed choreography and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book offers new ways of thinking about dance-related artworks that have taken place in galleries, museums and biennales over the past two decades as part of the choreographic turn. It focuses on the concept of intersubjectivity and theorises about what happens when subjects meet within a performance artwork. The resulting relations are crucial to instances of performance art in which embodied subjects engage as spectators, participants and performers in orchestrated art events. Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art deploys a multi-disciplinary approach across dance choreography and evolving manifestations of performance art. An innovative, overarching concept of choreography sustains the idea that intersubjectivity evolves through places, spaces, performance and spectatorship. Drawing upon international examples, the book introduces readers to performance art from the South Pacific and the complexities of de-colonising choreography. Artists Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy, Jordan Wolfson, Alicia Frankovich and Shigeyuki Kihara are discussed.

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.

En 2008, le centre d'art contemporain La Ferme du Buisson accueillait le commissaire d'exposition Mathieu Copeland pour la présentation remarquée d'Une Exposition Chorégraphiée. Composée exclusivement de mouvements interprétés par trois danseurs pendant deux mois, l'exposition fit date dans l'histoire des relations entre danse et arts plastiques. 0Au-delà de l'expérience unique qu'elle a constituée pour ceux qui l'ont vécue, Une Exposition Chorégraphiée a nourri une multitude de questions qui ont fait leur chemin pour donner naissance à un ouvrage intitulé Chorégraphier l'exposition. 0Le livre réunit plus d'une trentaine d'artistes plasticiens, chorégraphes, musiciens, cinéastes, théoriciens et commissaires d'exposition internationaux. Formidable panorama des relations entre chorégraphie et exposition, il orchestre une polyphonie de points de vue à partir de cinq prismes : la partition, l'espace, le temps, le corps et la mémoire.

In Choreographing Agonism, author Goran Petrović Lotina offers new insight into the connections between politics and performance. Exploring the political and philosophical roots of a number of recent leftist civil movements, Petrović Lotina forcefully argues for a re-imagining of artistic performance as an instrument of democracy capable of contesting a dominant politics. Inspired by post-Marxist theories of discourse theory, hegemony, conflict, and pluralism, and using tension as a guiding philosophical, political, and artistic force, the book expands the politico-philosophical debate on theories of performance. It offers both scholars and practitioners of performance a thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which artistic performance can be viewed politically as ‘agonistic choreo-political practice,’ a powerful strategy for mobilising alternative ways of living together and invigorating democracy. Choreographing Agonism makes a bold and innovative contribution to the discussion of political and philosophical thought in the field of Performance Studies.

Told from the perspective of the dancers, »Processing Choreography: Thinking with William Forsythe's Duo« is an ethnography that reconstructs the dancers' activity within William Forsythe's Duo project. The book is written legibly for readers in dance studies, the social sciences, and dance practice. Considering how the choreography of Duo emerged through practice and changed over two decades of history (1996-2018), Elizabeth Waterhouse offers a nuanced picture of creative cooperation and institutionalized process. She presents a compelling vision of choreography as a nexus of people, im/material practices, contexts, and relations. As a former Forsythe dancer herself, the author provides novel insights into this choreographic community.

This book is an innovative study that places performance and dance studies in conversation with ecology by exploring the significance of dirt in performance. Focusing on a range of 20th- and 21st-century performances that include modern dance, dance-theatre, Butoh, and everyday life, this book demonstrates how the choreography of dirt makes biological, geographical, and cultural meaning, what the author terms "biogeocultography". Whether it’s the Foundling Father digging into the earth’s strata in Suzan-Lori Park’s The America Play (1994), peat hurling through the air in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975), dancers frantically shovelling out fistfuls of dirt in Eveoke Dance Theatre’s Las Mariposas (2010), or Butoh performers dancing with fungi in Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos (2018), each example shows how the incorporation of dirt can reveal micro-level interactions between species – like the interplay between microscopic skin bacteria and soil protozoa – and macro-level interactions – like the transformation of peat to a greenhouse gas. By demonstrating the stakes of moving dirt, this book posits that performance can operate as a space to grapple with the multifaceted ecological dilemmas of the Anthropocene. This book will be of broad interest to both practitioners and researchers in theatre, performance studies, dance, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

This choreographed book is dedicated to the phenomenon of the bare body in contemporary performance. This work of artistic research draws on philosophical, biopolitical, and ethical discourses relevant to the appearance of bare bodies in choreography, setting a framework for a reflexive movement between affect and ethics, sensuous address and response. Acts of exposure and concealment are culturally situated and anchored, and are examined for their methodological and nanopolitical significance. The concepts of anarchic responsibility and choreo-ethics lead to a reevaluation of contact, relationship, and solidarity. Choreography is thus understood as a complex field of revelatory experiences based on ecologies of aesthetic perception and ethico-political agency.