Amy Seiwert

This chapter describes the career of Amy Seiwert, a Bay Area choreographer who, over a period twenty years, moved from neoclassical ballerina to full-time contemporary ballet choreographer with a desire to reformulate the classical dance lexicon. Her goal was to create dances, as well as dance practices, that could maintain the beauty of the classical language while reflecting and commenting on the realities of contemporary life. Thanks to the experimental dance scene in San Francisco, California, she eagerly exposed herself to the many choreographic tools long familiar in contemporary and postmodern dance. These included improvisation, scoring, movement games, and aleatory processes, all of which are organized forms of play. Play, and the agency and daring it requires, brought forth new, imaginative embodiments of movement problems and strategies for Seiwert; through them she has been able to address pressing social and existential questions and prove contemporary ballet’s relevance to the twenty-first century.

Unpredictable Manoeuvres

Eva Karczag improvises resistance towards the institutional appropriation of a ‘somatic’ approach she helped develop. Since leaving London Festival Ballet in the 1970s to join Strider, Britain’s first experimental dance company, and later the Australian experimental collective Dance Exchange, Karczag has mined motile and creative latitude against institutional control. In somatics training, and related choreographic modalities, she cultivates principles of physical ease and individual authenticity. She brought this facility to the development of some of Trisha Brown’s signature works when she joined the company in 1979, yet Karczag left in 1985 concerned that New York’s careerist arts culture was erasing her creative difference. She has since pursued improvisation on the margins of Western contemporary dance. In her choreography and pedagogy, Karczag critiques professionalization with a body that eludes commercial and institutional agendas. She chooses audience proximity over the proscenium arch, dancing radical contingency. She thus resists the collapsing of 1970s experimentation into commercial ideas of innovation.

Halprin, Anna (Schuman) (1920--)

A dancer, choreographer, community leader, and educator, Anna Halprin helped to pioneer what she called "experimental dance" in the 1960s. After training with the modern dance performer and choreographer Doris Humphrey, she turned to dance education, fusing these dual tracks of performance and pedagogy into a practice where dance changed the dancer. Her experimental dance theater events helped prefigure happenings, performance art, and experimental theater works. Located at the boundaries between art and life, healing, ritual, and performance, Halprin created participatory site-specific dances, art events situated in the midst of urban life. Breaking down the boundaries between spectator and performer, her dance events deliberately reconfigured socially marginalized individuals as the subject and medium of performance, including people with HIV/AIDS and the aged. Beginning in the early 1960s, Halprin started offering dance workshops on the "dance deck," the dramatic outdoor wooden dance studio designed in 1953 by Arch Lauterer, the theater designer, and Lawrence Halprin, Halprin’s husband and a renowned urban designer. Halprin’s students in these early years included several who would become founders of dance minimalism, including Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk—artists who were inspired by her precedent for framing pedestrian actions as dance, relinquishing control, and embracing difficult personal history as legitimate subject matter for dance.

Lopukhov, Fedor Vasilievich (1886–1973)

The most prolific choreographer of the early Soviet period, Fedor Lopukhov was associated with two seemingly contradictory developments in Soviet ballet in the 1920s: his interest in experimental dance, especially his theories of the relationship between movement and music, and his work to restore the ballets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably those of the choreographer Marius Petipa, whose legacy had suffered in the chaotic years following the 1917 Revolution. Lopukhov had some connection to virtually every innovation in early Soviet ballet practice. From his attempt to stage a nonnarrative ballet to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in 1923 (Dance Symphony: The Magnificence of the Universe) to choreography that celebrated the October Revolution with avant-garde scenography (The Red Whirlwind, 1924), and finally, the scandals surrounding his collaborations with composer Dmitry Shostakovich (Bolt, 1931; The Bright Stream, 1935), he remained a tireless innovator and theoretician of the new Soviet dance.

Lecture Performance as Contemporary Dance

The “lecture performance” is a key genre in the field of Konzepttanz. Prominently present in the early twenty-first-century scene of experimental dance, this genre is not limited to dance only, nor is it exclusively German. Lecture performances give expression to an understanding of dance as a form of knowledge production—knowledge not (or not only) about dance but also dance as a specific form of knowledge that raises questions about the nature of knowledge and about practices of doing research. This chapter situates this trend within a genealogy of bodily knowledge and its academic dissemination that had reached its first high point in the dance conventions during the Weimar years. By analyzing particular examples of lecture performances, it demonstrates the self-reflexive structures that emerge between scientific paper and corporeal act. It explains in which ways lecture performances redefine what it means to be a dancer, seeing it as an attitude rather than a profession.

Somaesthetics and Dance

Dance is proposed as the most representative of somaesthetic arts in Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics and other writings of Richard Shusterman. Shusterman offers a useful, but incomplete approach to somaesthetics of dance. In the examples provided, dance appears as subordinate to another art form (theater or photography) or as a means to achieving bodily excellence. Missing, for example, are accounts of the role of dance as an independent art form, how somaesthetics would address differences in varying approaches to dance, and attention to the viewer’s somaesthetic dance experience. Three strategies for developing new directions for dance somaesthetics are offered here: identify a fuller range of applications of somaesthetics to dance as an independent art form (e.g. Martha Graham); develop somaesthetics for a wider range of theatre dance (e.g. ballet, modern and experimental dance); and relate somaesthetics to more general features of dance (content, form, expression, style, kinesthetics) necessary for understanding the roles of the choreographer/dancer and the viewer.

Doctors can dance

Between 2008–2010 the School of Medicine at Queen's University Belfast funded and supported two unique and intensive three week interdisciplinary performance projects in which medical and drama students worked together to create an experimental dance theatre piece. One of the unique aspects of this collaboration was that the medical students who participated in the project received the same credit as their peers taking a three-week clinical elective. This paper, which is not a conventional academic paper, is a reflection on that project, and is based on a keynote address given by Anna Newell, the director of project, at the 8th Annual Galway Symposium on Higher Education in June 2010. The Symposium title was 'Creative Thinking: Re-imagining the University'. The sections in boxes are direct quotes from Anna Newell's address.

Seven Steps, Seven Veils: Salomé in Russia

The article concentrates on experimental dance movements of the outside of the Ballets Russes, especially the danse plastique, in St. Petersburg, Munich, and Moscow. Particular attention is paid to the innovative interpretations of Salomé and analogous subjects by Ida Rubinstein, Alexander Sacharoff, Lev Lukin, and Kasian Goleizovsky. Reference is made to the persistence of the Symbolist esthetic in dance of the 1910s and to pictorial renderings of the various performances by artists such as Léon Bakst, Marianne Werefkin, and Boris Erdman.

At Home in the World? Mobilizing Inbetweenness in ‘Choreographing Identities’

Examining a programme of four solos by Los Angeles experimental dance artists Taisha Paggett, Rebecca Pappas, Christine Suarez and Hana van der Kolk, this short article argues how the choreographed subject-in-motion can be deployed as a political tactic to critique identity as a static category by capitalizing on the flux of moving bodies.