Output details

FAR. Choreographic work for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance. FAR was co-produced by Sadler's Wells, London, UK and Peak Performances @ Montclair State University, Montclair, USA and was made possible in part by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. FAR was co-commissioned by Maison de la Danse, Lyon, FR; Fondazione I Teatri, Reggio Emilia, IT; Belgrade Dance Festival, Belgrade, SE; Belfast Festival, Belfast, UK; Brighton Dome, Brighton, UK; Laban Theatre, London, UK and DanceEast, Ipswich, UK. Premiered on 17th November 2010, at Sadler's Wells, London. Currently Touring. DVD of performance and Programme Documentation.

FAR resulted from a residency at the UC San Diego with David Kirsh, Director of the Interactive Cognition Lab, where we explored the process of distributed thinking and action in the collective making of a dance. During the residency, Random dancers and I created a new dance work. Professor Kirsh and colleagues collected data of this process using more than a dozen video cameras and extensive interviewing. The project had four main aims: (1) to explore how people acting as a dynamic team are able to invent complex artistic works; (2) to examine how people think ‘with their bodies’; (3) to develop new representations of how choreographic forms are created; and (4) to incorporate these representations into a suite of interactive installations to educate audiences about dance structures. Data was subsequently analysed and interpreted, with the objective of developing new knowledge about the choreographic process and a digital archive was formed (see second URL). The critical themes for FAR emerged from Roy Porter’s ‘Flesh in the Age of Reason’, a catalogue of how historical orthodoxies were tested and redrawn through processes like autopsies, operations and direct intervention with the materiality of the body. This 'putting the body in question' was replicated cognitively in FAR, using approaches from distributed cognition. This resulted in new strategies for dance making: using sonification to shape action, making ‘on/with’ and ‘through’ bodies; refinement of task-based creative exercises that implement new understandings of how ideas are propagated, shared and iterated around a group. Aspects of this research are visible in the piece itself: movement language; form, such as choreographic 'cells', ordered in unorthodox ways; inversions, non-sequiturs; live improvisation; rough edits and long interventions. The piece is bookended by two 'deaths'; of an idea, and of a body. See first URL/programme note for additional context, collaborators and images.

http://www.randomdance.org/productions/wayne_mcgregor_current/far

http://www.randomdance.org/r_research/previous_projects/previous_projects/distributed_choreographic_cognition/about