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DISCOURSES FROM DANCERS INSIDE ACTION MACHINES

My PhD research project, meta: discourses from dancers inside action machines, seeks to examine the application of external frameworks such as equipment, scores, task-based processes, exercises, and digital technologies within studio-based dance practices and the affect they have on dancers bodies. I'm interested in how dancers perspectives will develop the discourse surrounding studio-based dance practice and processes, as it is within the act or context of dancing that the experience resides. By placing dancers at the centre of my research I am seeking to examine and articulate how different forms of external frameworks and their application in studio-based dance practice and processes, construct opportunities to challenge what dance might be as an art form, choreographic practice, and how dancer’s bodies can be developed or altered through their engagement with specific practices and processes.

INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE

 

Ideas:

  • Construct an interactive system that offers any body an opportunity to engage with your idea of ex-quiry

  • Play more with referential platforms - what might this mean for performance and the installation? How do these 2 iterations of your research iterate what already exists in a diverse constellation of platforms.

  • What kinds of texts might emerge from within, between and surrounding materials that already exist? How might you interpret them in another way? Shift perspective???

  • How might you think about scoring your work from samples within your project to date?

  • How might your entire project operate as a reference space and generate action?

 

 

INSPIRED BY TWISTER

 

The system I have designed is inspired by the classic game Twister - the first game to use human beings as playing pieces. 

 

Re-configured for a table surface it is designed to be played by up to 8 dancers, each with their indpendent headset of tunes and instructions to interpret. The task is performed using the upper body in contact with or in relation to the coloured dots on the table. 

PERFORMANCE | META

 

  • 3 reference platforms operating at once - video visualisation, sound score, human body

  • creating an open constellation of mobile parts

  • attempting to sustain a dialogue with ideas surrounding studio-based processes in live performance mode

  • thinking about the nature of the sound score for meta as also having some of the similar kinds of instructions or tasks within the ways that I am playing with language with the ways that the layers of the text to speech function - loops, iterations, repetition, pronunciation all have links to the physical tasks/scores at play in performance

  • echoes and traces of the work leading to this point

  • the audience is also undertaking a process of assembling - assembling from out of their own experiences the “meta” of META

  • throughout all in both my experience of making and performing, and the audiences experience of witnessing there is an underlying sampling - cuts, breaks, grooves and riffs that we can each have our own jam with/within

  • not narrative but also hopefully not vignette in nature - it should be able to flow out within one big referential playing field

  • it’s a question of attention also

  • attending to multiple platforms of information at once

  • the sound is a referential platform - as are the video and my body and the movement it performs

 

 

EDITED VIDEO DOCUMENTATION OF THE INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE 'META'

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