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Choreographing problems : expressive concepts in European dance

This dissertation explores how a recent set of practices III contemporary choreography in Europe (1998-2007) give rise to distinctive concepts of its own, concepts that account for processes of making, performing, and attending choreographic perfonnances. The concepts express problems that distinguish the creation of seven works examined here (Self unfinished and Untitled by Xavier Le Roy, Weak Dance Strong Questions by Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema, heatre-elevision by Boris Charmatz, Nvsbl by Eszter Salamon, 50/50 by Mette Ingvartsen, and It's In The Air by Ingvartsen and Jefta van Dinther). The problems posed by these choreographers critically address the prevailing regime of representation in theatrical dance, a regime characterized by an emphasis on bodily movement, identification of the human body, and the theater's act of communication in the reception of the audience. In the works considered here, the synthesis between the body and movement-as the relation of movement to the body as its subject or of movement to the object of dance-upon which modem dance is founded is broken. Choreographing problems, in the sense explored in this dissertation, involves composing these ruptures between movement, the body and duration in perfonnance such that they engender a shock upon sensibility, one that inhibits recognition. Thus problems "force" thinking as an exercise of the limits of sensibility that can be accounted for not by representation, but by the principle of expression that Gilles Deleuze develops from Spinoza's philosophy. "Part-bodies," "part-machines," "movement-sensations," "headbox," "wired assemblings," "stutterances," "powermotion," "crisis-motion," "cut-ending," and "resonance" are proposed here as expressive concepts that account for the construction of problems and compositions that desubjectivize or disobjectivize relations between movement, body, and duration, between performing and attending (to) performance. Developed through a careful analysis of how problems structure these performances, this thesis on expressive concepts further contributes to a redefinition of performance in general by making two additional claims. The first concerns the disjunction between making, performing and attending as three distinct modes of performance that involve divergent temporalities and processes. The second regards the shift from performance as the act in the passing present towards the temporalization of perfonllance qua process, where movement and duration are equated with ongoing transformation, a process that makes the past persist in the present.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:565949
Date January 2012
CreatorsCvejic, Bojana
PublisherKingston University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/25084/

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