12/4/13

Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com

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Choreography is dead. Long live dance

Questions are being asked by dancers and dance-makers about the boundaries of the art form. Which is cause for excitement

Work that is asking questions Tino Sehgal with participants in his Turbine Hall piece These Associations. Photograph: Johnny Green

It's nearly half a century since American choreographer Yvonne Rainer announced the death of traditional dance values, in her famously radical "No" manifesto of 1965. Rainer's opening statement: "No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image" spoke for a generation of choreographers who were questioning the limits that had been placed on what kind of movement, what kind of performance could rank as dance. Over the years, that questioning ethos drove a wave of experiment, from minimalist
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Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com

works that were constructed out of ordinary pedestrian moves to multimedia dance theatre, deploying an eclectic sprawl of dance, gesture, text and props.

Blurred boundaries Yvonne Rainer's Choreographing You. Photograph: Lawrence Burns Eventually Rainer's manifesto became absorbed into the mainstream of dance performance, but the combative undercurrent of her argument didn't go away. For instance, at a recent symposium organised by Bellyflop magazine, Antje Hildebrand contributed a "Provocation" titled The End of Choreography, whose theme included a meditation on what choreography might look like if it was detached altogether from the idea of dance and even from performance. Hildebrand argued that if the term "choreography" is defined as a form of structured activity then it might be applied to anything from the flocking of birds to the orchestration of political protest, to forms of social communication. And if the elements of the choreographer's craft involve space, rhythm, time and physical communication, these tools might be put to an open-ended range of creative uses. Certainly a growing number of artists who would formerly be categorised as choreographers are working in areas suggested by Hildebrand. Tino Sehgal presented one of his first public works as part of the Resolution season of new dance at The Place. But he came to prominence with These Associations, a work about group dynamics for the Tate's Turbine Hall, in which performers in variously choreographed formations interacted with the public, telling them stories, asking questions, making provocations, and subtly re-choreographing the crowd.

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Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com

'No spectators, only performers' William Forsythe's White Bouncy Castle. Photograph: Timur Emek/Getty Images As far back as 1997, William Forsythe's White Bouncy Castle created a choreographic space in which "there were no spectators, only performers" ie the sprawling, bouncing, jumping members of the public. The French choreographer Jerome Bel studied Barthes and Foucault as a prelude to creating works that were witty, surreal subversions of performance and participation. Siobhan Davies has moved from pure dance to a more eclectic range of visual art projects, including film, which she still resolutely describes as choreography. Jonathan Burrows, in partnership with composer Matteo Fargion, delivers "choreographed lectures" that tread a rigorous, hilarious line between music, erudition, dance and slapstick, while the latest project by Rosie Kay veers towards dance as a tool for anthropological study. All this is lively evidence of an art form pushing its boundaries, and arguing with itself. And I love the fact that as practitioners debate the question of what they mean by dance and choreography, I have no idea where or what it will lead to. At the same time, however, there's a polarised and even puritanical rhetoric to some of this debate which I can't help reacting to. And not simply because the logical conclusion of Hildebrand's case for the death of choreography would pretty much make me redundant too. Right now, dance has never looked more popular, or despite the sapping effects of funding cuts more creatively diverse. And I'm wary of imposing on that creativity any theory that is predicated on a politics of schism from the "No's" of Rainer's manifesto, to the apocalyptic imagery of Hildebrand's argument, to the bluntly named Non Danse movement that has been thriving in France. If I'm able to relish the brilliant intellectual legerdemain of Burrows and Fargion, or the meticulous poetics of Davies' film-making,
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Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com

it's not because I see those talents as a negation of traditional dance-making. I don't see those choreographers as occupying a conceptually superior high ground, denied to those like Mark Morris, Crystal Pite, Wayne McGregor and others who create form, meaning and beauty out of pure dance steps. From where I stand as a critic, choreography doesn't look anywhere near dead or dying it's just playing on a much wider spectrum. Previous Blog home Next
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