Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Roehampton University : A - Dance
Staging recall and reiteration: Umm... I... and uh... [revisited]
This practice-led dance output stems from an overarching enquiry: how does a choreographic score facilitate a performer’s process of recall and reiteration live onstage, and what performance principles emerge as she engages with and activates the score in performance?
In the resulting solo work Umm... I... and uh... [revisited], the device of a memory map is used to guide the performer through a process of remembering a previous work she has performed. The map depicts distinct points in space, each of which corresponds to a specific memory with a choreographic instruction or prompt attached to it. This particular form of choreographic score – informed by, but also distinct from, those of choreographers Jonathan Burrows, Xavier Le Roy and Thomas Lehmen – supports the performer’s process of arranging memories spatially on stage, in order to physically reconstruct, reiterate and present them to an audience. The fragmentary experience of remembering is reflected in the spatial structure and performance quality created by the score.
The performance principles generated determine:
a. the performer’s relation to the (theatrical) stage as a clearly demarcated space of appearances, as discussed in the writings of Gay McAuley and Nicholas Ridout;
b. the emergence of subjectivity through the solipsistic act of constructing a system or reality with its own inner logic, which echoes the thinking of philosopher Boris Groys and art historian Johanna Burton on open systems in contemporary visual art.
These principles are explored choreographically in relation to: the idea of belonging to a horizontal theatre space; the onstage/offstage dialectic; the notion of the miniaturesque and performance as a gift.
Such findings were articulated in a conference presentation and journal article (see portfolio), and were further tested through expansion of the solo into two group works, commissioned as repertory for students at Coventry University and Trinity Laban respectively.
