I’ve been excited by a couple of things lately about dance and choreography that have come out of both practice and discussions with others. Here they are, in note form:
The plasticity of choreography
- Choreography takes many shapes and forms, from very conventional tasks to more radical proposals for generating performance
- The methods or approaches for choreography are dependent on my understanding of the people I am working with, the nature of our relationship(s), and the ideas and materials we are working with together. This leads me to consider …
The limits of collaboration
- I feel a strong sense of frustration with the conversations that go on about collaboration as some kind of panacea for old-standing issues of authorship, ownership, agency and autonomy
- choreographer Robert Clark says that the skills to do with collaboration are different from skills to do with ‘creativity’. See skellis.net/blog/somewhere-in-the-middle
- in other words, choreography is as much to do with relating between artists as it is to do with – sorry about the bluntness of this generalisation — making movement
- I make work with other people because of the problems (some of them can be quite serious) that are generated by these exchanges, and because of the differences that are revealed by relating with others
- By working with others I am not seeking confirmation or validation as a choreographer or dancer
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