Work(s) and (Non)production in Contemporary Movement Practices
Keywords:
Ontology, practice, analytic philosophy,Abstract
This paper considers how the presentation of movement practices in performance contexts blurs the distinction between making and performance, raising questions about the nature of dance ‘works’. I examine the way that practice is foregrounded in the work of UK dance artists Katye Coe and Charlie Morrissey, and American choreographer Deborah Hay, troubling distinctions between the internal and external aspects of performance. In response to this, I examine the applicability of the work–concept (Goehr 1992), to current dance practices, suggesting that the concept is an open one and refers not solely to stable art objects, but also indicates open-ended entities, which are formed through a confluence of practice and performance.
References
Adshead-Lansdale, Janet, ed. 2008. Decentring Dancing Texts: The Challenge of Interpreting Dances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———, ed. Dancing Texts: Intertextuality in Interpretation. London: Dance Books.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man Without Content. Translated by Georgia Albert. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Anderson, Jack. 1983. “Idealists, Materialists, and the Thirty-Two Fouettés.” In What is Dance?, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 410–420. New York: Oxford University Press.
Armelagos, Adina and Mary Sirridge. 1978. “The Identity Crisis in Dance.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (2): 129–139. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/429836
Banes, Sally and Noël Carroll. 1994. “Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley’s ‘What is going on in a Dance?’” In Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, edited by Sally Banes, 10–15. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Blades, Hetty. 2011. “Dance on the Internet: An Ontological Investigation.” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1): 40–52. http://www.pjaesthetics.org/index.php/pjaesthetics/article/viewFile/64/61
Burrows, Jonathan and Matteo Fargion. 2013. Rebelling Against Limit. Premiere Düsseldorf.
Carr, David. 1987. “Thought and Action in the Art of Dance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 27 (4): 345–357. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/27.4.345
Coe, Katye and Charlie Morrissey. 2015a. Wild Card – Katye Coe: Preparation. Presented at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.
———. 2015b. Interview with Hetty Blades. Siobhan Davies Studio, London.
———. 2013. Personal conversations during studio observations. Coventry University UK.
Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura. 2014. “Performance Philosophy – Staging A New Field.” In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Alice Lagaay, 15–38. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura and Alice Lagaay. 2014. “Introduction.” In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Alice Lagaay, 1–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cutrofello, Andrew. 2005. Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. New York and London: Routledge.
Cvejić, Bojana. 2015. “From Odd Encounters to a Prospective Confluence: Dance Philosophy.” Performance Philosophy 1:7–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.21476/PP.2015.1129
D’Amato, Alison. 2014. “Performing Interpretation: Writing for the Body in Three Indeterminate Language Scores.” Paper presented at Writing Dancing/Dancing Writing, Joint Conference of SDHS and CORD, Iowa University, 13–16 November. https://sdhs.org/proceedings-2014
Davies, David. 2009. “The Primacy of Practice.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2): 159–171. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2009.01345.x
———. 2004. Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Davies, Siobhan. 2014. Table of Contents. Premiere ICA, London.
Galili, Itzik. 2005. A Linha Curva. Premiere Teatro Municipal de São Paolo.
Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hay, Deborah. 2013. “Using the Sky.” Motion Bank. http://scores.motionbank.org/dh/#set/sets
———. 2010. No Time to Fly. Premiere St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York.
———. 2000. My Body, The Buddhist. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.
———. 1994. Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Hutchinson, Ann. 1972. Labanotation or Kinetography Laban: The System of Analyzing and Recording Movement. London: Oxford University Press.
Independent Dance. 2014. What Now [documentation booklet]. London: Independent Dance and Siobhan Davies Dance.
Jones, Sue. 1999. “Do Rabbits Dance? A Problem Concerning the Identification of Dance.” In Dance, Education and Philosophy, edited by Graham McFee, 85–100. Oxford: Meyer and Meyer Sport.
Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Alresford UK: Zero Books
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance. New York: Routledge.
Louppe, Laurence. (1997) 2010. Poetics of Contemporary Dance. Translated by Sally Gardner. Alton: Dance Books.
Mackrell, Judith. 2016a. “Rambert Review - Lucy Guerin’s Zombie Dance Chanel Macbeth’s Hurlyburly.” The Guardian. May 11. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/may/11/rambert-review-lucy-guerin-dancers-macbeth
———. 2016b. “LA Dance Project Review - Millepied Goes for Some Balanchine Shine.” The Guardian. June 27. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jun/27/la-dance-project-review-benjamin-millepied-sadlers-wells-london
Margolis, Joseph. 1981. “The Autographic Nature of the Dance.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (4): 419–427. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/430241
Margolis, Joseph. 1959. “The Identity of a Work of Art.” Mind (68) 269: 34–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXVIII.269.34
McFee, Graham. 2011. The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance and Understanding. Hampshire: Dance Books.
———. 1992. Understanding Dance. London: Routledge.
Meskin, Aaron. 1999. “Productions, Performances and Their Evaluation.” In Dance, Education and Philosophy, edited by Graham McFee, 45–62. Oxford: Meyer and Meyer Sport.
Pakes, Anna. 2015. “Philosophy and the Work of Conceptual Dance.” Paper presented at Dance Studies Colloquium, Temple University, Philadelphia, March 17. http://livestream.com/accounts/1927261/events/3377785/videos/80603405
———. 2013. “The Plausibility of a Platonist Ontology of Dance.” In Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance Performance and Practices, edited by Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell, 84–101. Hampshire: Dance Books.
Peirce, Charles. 1906. “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism.” The Monist, 16: 492–546. Reprinted 1974 in vol. 4 of C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Pouillaude, Frédéric. 2009. “D’une Graphie Qui Ne Dit Rien”, in Frédéric Pouillaude, Le Désoeuvrement Chorégraphique: Etude Sur la Notion D’oeuvre En Danse, 207–242. Paris: Vrin.
Rainer, Yvonne. 1963. Room Service. Premiere Judson Church, New York.
Rubidge, Sarah. 2000. “Identity and the Open Work.” In Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade, edited by Stephanie Jordan, 205–215. London: Dance Books.
Ridout, Nicholas, and Rebecca Schneider. 2012. “Precarity and Performance: An Introduction.” TDR/The Drama Review 56 (4): 5-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00210
Sparshott, Francis. 1995. A Measured Pace: Towards A Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Abingdon: Routledge.
Thomasson, Amie. 2006. “Debates about the Ontology of Art: What Are We Doing Here?” Philosophy Compass 1 (3): 245–255. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00021.x
———. 2005. “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (3): 221–229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00202.x
Van Camp, Julie. 2006. “A Pragmatic Approach to the Identity of Works of Art.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20 (1): 42–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jsp.2006.0017
———. 1998. “Ontology of Dance.” In Oxford Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Imschoot, Myriam. (2005) 2010. “Rest in Pieces: On Scores, Notation and the Trace in Dance.” Multitudes 21: 1-8. http://www.make-up-productions.net/media/materials/RestsInPieces_Myriam%20VanImschoot.pdf
Wollheim, Richard. 1975. Art and its Objects. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).