Research Projects
Dancing is...
After a decade of exploring non-instrumentality through dancing in work with various scores, I sense a lag in this effort generating fruitful results. My intuition is to dance for the sake of something and invite other dance practitioners into this pursuit.
In my studies 15 years ago, I was busy framing choreography as a set of tools independent of the medium or expression of dance. This compelled some wild and inspiring theorizing on a choreography that exists everywhere, a set of psychedelic goggles to perceive movement in social, architectural, political, and institutional space. I watched, in my little backyard, how this development moved some dances out of the theatre space and some lecture performances into the theatre space, some dances into the museum and some conferences onto the stage.
Aim and research questions
I am really devoted to the specific ways of sensing, knowing and feeling that can be cultivated in a dance practice. I love how we, dancers, never really can enter a room without our body and our mind, how we insist on creating languages for stuff we do not yet know; how we experiment with forms of co-existence; how we shapeshift and transform. I currently observe a manifold of urgent and constant situations that these tangible capacities could be in relation to and with. I would like, through these studio sessions with dance practitioners, to find these relationships. How can we mobilize dancing for something more than itself?
Research implementation and anticipated impact
I plan to implement these questions through a weekly studio practice during 14 weeks of the autumn term. I will invite colleagues with various dance backgrounds, from within and outside of SKH, to a score that generates dancing and writing. The studio session will follow a protocol that easily repeats and my findings from each session will be treated and documented in a continuous fashion. My ambition after the 14 studio encounters is to have established a reliable dancing practice, a text and a proposal for the next phase of questions to ask of and through a dancing practice.
Through a revision and re-framing of the original score Dancing is that dedicates less energy to excluding, I would like to investigate what dancing can mobilize. I understand this research as housework; a sort of long overdue effort to sort, organize and direct my dancing practice into a more long-term artistic research context. I anticipate that this regular studio practice will impact my attention and work as programme head for the BA in dance performance at SKH as well as contribute with more dancing to the artistic research environment at SKH.
Collaboration
There is no formal collaboration but as I will have 14 studio sessions, I will invite 14 dance practitioners to share in my research.
Schedule
90 minutes of weekly studio sessions, September to December 2024
Links
This format of studio sessions is inspired by my time with Peter Mills that resulted in this podcast:
