Creating dance

Brain Lucas writes a generous, reflective musing on how even established artists are in a constant and continuing state of development and growth.

Interdisciplinary performance has proven fertile ground for the development of dance hybrids. Gesture, text, film, object body and digital-media have aided in voicing the dance and moving it towards theatrical, cinematic and technological manifestations of the body. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that these ‘signposts’ are often used to make explicit meaning that lies concealed in the ambiguous movement vocabulary of dance. From a dissemination of performance methodologies arising out of postmodern and contemporary hybrids, I suggest that the use of signs and referents borrowed from other disciplines can intercept the kinetic experience of dancer to audience.

Julie-Anne Long takes us on a journey, through the inspiration, creation and realisation of a working process. She reflects on collaboration and the influence of place with a word skill that replicates her expertise as a dancing devisor.

Shelley Lasica talks candidly and elegantly about the way she makes work – how she begins, how she collaborate with others, and how they get things done.

Helen Herbertson provides some poetic reflections about the nature of her. This results in some beautiful, powerful prose that evokes, rather than explains, the why, when and how of her devising processes.

The Fondue Set – Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders – offer up a fascinating response to a set of provocations. They reveal their process in a three-part harmony that speaks to the particular concerns of this group of female artists.

To dance is human. Sensori-motor expressions are intricately evolved and sophisticated prior to communication with words: from birth bodies “speak”. Body memory supplies a deep structure for surface expressions in moving moments. Choreographic imagination is inspired by an extraordinary range of conceptual sources. However, that ability to locate movement from anatomically possible performative elements coded in dance genre vernaculars or elicited from novel improvised movement sequences is essential to spatial-kinaesthetic art or dance composition. Synergies between improvisation and these creative choices are revealed through the legacies of Gertrud Bodenwieser, Bodenwieser dancers and interviews with contemporary choreographers on intended or sculpted meanings that hang off dancers’ moves.

The key message of the paper is that while observing a person moving, somatic and sensory processes are elicited and these have an impact on both the observer and the mover. The recognition of these processes is important to assessment, observation and clinical therapy protocols. The paper describes embodied awareness, including methods used in Authentic Movement, Dance, Dance/Movement Therapy, Body Psychotherapy, Body-Mind Centring, Sensory Awareness and Jungian Analysis. Arts-based practices can inform clinical practices, and embodied interaction in clinical practice can also inspire artistic research. The methodology of kinaesthetic attunement weaves subjective and objective experiences and can inform clinical relationships, childcare and educational practices.

Tess de Quincey expresses ideas about how and why she makes art in a stream-of-consciousness style of poetry.

Narelle Benjamin talks about how and why she makes dance for both stage and film.

This paper discusses how during an East West Dance Conference in Mumbai in 1984, several choreographers and dancers from India and the West met and discussed several issues, which resulted in the changes that have taken place now in Indian dance. Contemporary themes as opposed to religious and mythological stories have become a part of Indian Modern Dance. There is a shift both in the content and language of dance. Empowerment of women, explorations in abstract tradition, social changes all have now found reflection in Modern Indian Dance

In this paper Ann Kipling Brown presents an overview of the association and the place of performance at the triennial conferences. Following this discussion, three other daCi members, Kathy Vlassopoulos, Karen Bond and Jeff Meiners, whose work focuses on dance for young people, describe specific events and experiences they have created that reflect the aims of the association.

Firstly, Kathy Vlassopoulos describes the Children’s Dance Festival, held annually in Melbourne, Australia. The festival was initiated in1996 and creates a site-specific event that provides the opportunity for children to experience dance through a collaborative process with professional artists.

Secondly, Karen Bond gives an account of daCi’s 2nd Intergenerational Gathering, titled Out of many, we are One. Over an intensive three-day period, participants explored a progression of dancing and performing related to themes of self, community, and the future.

And thirdly, Jeff Meiners focuses on the creation of work for young children, spanning the years from birth to eight, and explores the nature of the work being created and the responses of the young children as active audience members.

This paper investigates how dance performance can challenge our usual perception and use of the performance site and as a result encourage artists to re-think the way we make dance for non-theatre sites. Discussion pertains to our relationships to the built environment and the influence of architectural practices on our experience of places. This leads to an exploration of my creative strategies for a site specific work created in 2007 for university students, at a centrally located area of their campus. The student project paved the way for my thinking in regard to my current doctoral studies which seeks to reveal how we understand built structures through our own bodily schema while at the same time the built environment informs our bodily state.

The aim of this paper is to consider cognition as a special type of movement or movement-within-movement. I argue that, by tracking the filigree effects of movement-within-movement across the boundaries within and between the body and the environment, the performative nature of our everyday actions becomes more accessible for study and transformation. It is my assertion that combining the perceptual sensitivities of artists with the experimental ingenuity of scientists makes it possible to dilate awareness of one’s own cognitive processes and thereby initiate a ‘practice of embodied cognition.’ I discuss two tasks that arise from attention to movement-within-movement: a contextualising task, emphasising the interdisciplinary efforts and first-person perspective necessary to address the explanatory gap between neuroscience and phenomenological understandings of lived experience.

The second is a coordinating task, which involves devising a practice that integrates movement-within-movement back into our engagement with the world rather than isolates cognitive processes from their context. Three of my own installation works from an exhibition I organised, the Reading Room: experiments in posture, movement and comprehension (2008) serve as examples of creative research that joins experimental structures from cognitive science and ecological psychology with sensory and experiential strategies from art. Such an approach to the study of perception and action would allow a first-person science or a practice of embodied cognition to emerge, integrating reflection and observation to optimise the performative process of making.

Naatayasala Hun Lakorn Lek, a Thai classical performing art, is a combination of human dance and puppet performance. Despite high competition with other modernised shows in the rapid changing society of Thailand, this group of performers have undertaken many adaptations and managed to maintain the existence of this art. The puppets have been developed to be more technical, more sophisticated and special effects and interaction with audiences incorporated. Modern marketing and management systems have been introduced. The continuing existence of this art form is evidence of how Thai artists have brought in modern knowledge and technology, while maintaining the valuable meaning and beauty of ancient Thai wisdom.

3D Motion capture is a fast evolving field and recent inertial technology may expand the artistic possibilities for its use in live performance. Inertial motion capture has three attributes that make it suitable for use with live performance; it is portable, easy to use and can operate in real-time. Using four projects, this paper discusses the suitability of inertial motion capture to live performance with a particular emphasis on dance. Dance is an artistic application of human movement and motion capture is the means to record human movement as digital data. As such, dance is clearly a field in which the use of real-time motion capture is likely to become more common, particularly as projected visual effects including real-time video are already often used in dance performances. Understandably, animation generated in real-time using motion capture is not as extensive or as clean as the highly mediated animation used in movies and games, but the quality is still impressive and the ‘liveness’ of the animation has compensating features that offer new ways of communicating with an audience.

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere season of The Australian Ballet's Melbourne Cup, choreographed by Rex Reid. Melbourne Cup was a popular hit of 1962 and the ballet drew on the country’s most famous social sporting event for its story and setting. Jordan Vincent has investigated the surprising facts connecting Reid’s work with a second ballet on the same subject by Melbourne's National Theatre, titled Cup Fever: a fantasy on The Cup.

In seminal investigations, researchers from the Victorian College of the Arts and the Universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney collaborated with dance artists and scholars to explore the nature of thinking in the embodiment of kinaesthetic, cognitive, emotional and aesthetic perceptions.

With reference to my solo performance Vivisection Vision: animal reflections, I discuss the key theoretical and conceptual aspects with regard to Agamben’s identification of the problem of the polis in the distinction between human and animal, to arrive at the figure of the ‘humanimal’. Initially created and performed in Japan, I identify the theo-political rhetoric concerned with the notion of ‘evil’ used in the Iraq War 2, followed by an analysis of and reflection upon this notion through the images and movement I made in response. From program notes to philosophical interpretation, what ethical potential is to be derived from this performance? How can we take responsibility?

Lovingly called the Sanaleipak or the land of gold, Manipur can boast of an integrated culture of primitive elements being refined with the influence of the mainstream Indian culture through the Sanskritisation process. Apart from the characteristics of Sanskritisation perceived elsewhere in India, a special instrument of Sanskritisation in Manipur has surfaced, which is her dance tradition. The ancient traditional festival, the Laiharaoba embodies all the aspects of Meitei life. The influence of the Chaitanite Vaishnavism in the 18th century brought about many social changes but its manifestation on the then existing dance practice was probably the highest form of aesthetic expression for the people. This paper aims to identify the changes brought about in the dance practice in the Meitei life and how it has become apparent in their daily social life.