Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Chichester
The Living Room
The Living Room, a small to middle scale professional choreography and practice-as-research project for 6-9 dancers, worked with the notions of choreographic ‘portraiture’ (Albright 1997, Marks 2003) and the ‘in-between’ (Briginshaw 2001) of dance and ‘the everyday’, as a means to explore the performers’ contribution and ownership in the formation of their onstage representation. Flexer (Choreographer) developed notions of in-between, primarily between dance and ‘the everyday’ and dismantled the ‘fourth wall’ to engender an informal mode of presentation. The work extends previous research and contemporaneous investigations of audience/performer interaction (Scan–Rosemary Butcher,2000;Ring–Felix Ruckert,2000).
The work plays between a formal and complex movement language and everyday gesture and behaviour generating a ‘matter of fact’ aesthetic that draws on post-modern dance practice and extends previous contemporaneous investigations of the nexus between audience, performer and choreographer such as The Song (2009) by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, A Series of Appointments (2010) by Siobhan Davies, The Quiet Dance (2005) by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion. This approach asserts dancers’ agency and extends interrogations of the notion of performativity within theatrical performance (Burt 2006;Briginshaw 2001).
The work also alluded to other in-betweens such as the notion of the ‘unhome’ and hybrid identities (Bhabha, 1994) in order to reveal autobiographical information/asserting socio-cultural difference. As choreographic strategy this makes reference to the liminal experience of migration and brings a political dimension to the reading of a work made by an Israeli choreographer working in the UK. This then deepens the investigation of choreographic portraiture. In turn, this furthers interrogations of the notion of performativity within theatrical performance (Burt 2006; Briginshaw 2001) and asserts the performers’ agency.
24 performances nationally and internationally (audience 5000 approx)
