”The decline of choreography...” by Paz Rojo
The documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) can be found in Research Catalogue and DIVA.
Visit the project The decline of choreography and its movement: a body's (path)way on the Research Catalogue and in DiVA.
A presentation of Paz Rojo's doctoral research project:
I'm concern with how choreography, as performance event and institutional value, enables dance to take on presence and expression in the world. To the extent that dance is produced within the different normative processes in which language, knowledge and creative values are inherent to the dispositif, namely choreography, these concerns have leaded me to think of a possible non-relationship between both, dance and choreography. From this stand point, the intention of this doctoral research project is to speculate on the performative and aesthetic aspects of this gap and thus to predict what the value creation of dance could be in present times. The thread that I intend to follow implies an experience of freedom that concerns dance and the body in movement. Dance's freedom is fugitive and speculative and therefore it has little or nothing to do with the dancer’s self-expression, imagination, performative or dance skills, but rather with implementing decision making processes which may distance the dancer away from the dancing. Accordingly, the working hypothesis of this project is that by implementing a performative gap between the dancer and the dancing –along with the knowledge, skills and the body's natural inclination to move–, it may be possible to continue dancing through a motion withdrawn from the value exchange system. A consideration which, in short, could entail a renewed conceptual field regarding the aesthetic and ethical project of dance as an artistic and conceptual category. What kind of value systems could be enabled if dance is approached from its being always ephemeral, non-significant and minor as a condition of potentiality? Could this dancing conditions be an element of intervention upon the dancer herself? How can we think of a dynamic motion that is only necessary to itself, but useless to any constitution of value? What are the performative consequences of a dance withdrawn from a structure of belonging or goal? How does movement materializes the distance between what is being and its actualization as something that can be consummed? How to free dance from the neoliberal gaze and its forms of recognition? What would it mean to dance and exposed dance from a point of view worthless to the neoliberal logic?
What we need is not to choreograph more, but to continue dancing from a different plane of perception.
Research's curriculum:
This research project is elaborated through different media and working formats such performance devices, laboratories, written essays, video-essays, curating contexts, colective research contexts and film. Through out its trayectory, the project has had different artistic, textual, curatorial and research colective manifestations such as the dance solos "whatever moving like this" (lo que sea moviéndose así). The collective performance experiments "Inaugural Action"; "YES WE CAN NOT, a pre-formance in the era of con-fusion" (2012); “The Gerries by Gerry”. The audio-visual essays: "I do not like community in the same way I do not like contact-improvisation"; "DANCISMO". The dance performance ECLIPSE:MUNDO, the printed publication “what do we talk about when we talk about dancing on a plane of destituent perception? , the short film “To see this dance”, the festival "What can a body do?" (La Casa Encendida, Madrid), the collective research contexts: "ASSIM NÃO, BUT HOW?", (LOTE, Sao Paulo); "[FIELD # 1] choreographing dissidence" (Teatro Pradillo, Madrid); "What if we let go being (artists)?" (La Casa Encendida, Madrid); "A piece ... together?" (Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Vienna); and the itinerant laboratory "choreography: a problem to practice" (Madrid, Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Vienna, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, Moscow, Stockholm and Mexico City).
