Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Winchester
DUOD Dance
This project questioned dynamic embodiment and the relationships produced, from a triadic perspective. Aims were to explore;
1. connections between somatic sensation and semiotic potential
2. the sensation and the perception of the nature of relatedness for dancers and for viewers
American post-modern dance abstracted the mechanics and form underlying human movement while European Dance Theatre harnessed the subject’s motivation for it. Drawing these two idioms together, this project explores how inner attitude can emerge through form, to be made visible in performance as intent in relation to referable meaning.
• Different tensions were used to expand predominant applications of force in contact improvisation and through the spatial affinities within and between the bodies, interpersonal structures and vocabularies were discovered.
• The nature of the qualities, revealed through a combination of their somatic characteristics, ie level of tension or release, and visible aspects, ie kinetic form offered potential for referable meaning. Feedback from dancer interviews, Q&A, and talks after six showings was used to inform the development of a 60 minute work using costume, set, music and video projection to reiterate the embodied discoveries.
The insights that the actualizing of movement is visible intent (Cunningham) but that Effort indicates referable meaning (LeCoq,) were shared in peformance. To balance the sensation and perception of changing tensivity/ Effort, performance in-the-round was used. This increased the sensory experience through proximity to bodies and energies and physical engagement with inanimate materials. Intersubjective relationships with performers were negotiated through audience interaction, modes of performance and dynamic scenography, grammars of movement / stillness and live/ pre-recorded audio and video. In interview & post performance discussion, feedback confirmed that intersubjective relationships were the referable meaning, beginning between performers and extending to audience. Their nature prescribed by somatic experience. A performative paper further articulated the insights.
