Yurika Kuremiya

Japanese Contemporary Dance, from Past to Present

At a time when Melbourne is inundated with Asian productions as part of its Asian Arts Triennale ASIATOPA, we can ask ourselves, where is Japanese contemporary dance now? In this article, I will focus in particular on the relatively unknown aspects of Japanese contemporary dance. I’ll start by taking us through its historical context, then examine its particularities, before considering its future. Read more...

Susan Leigh Foster

Choreographies of Protest

We are not throwing power off or away in order to be free. Nor do we believe, cynically, that nothing can be done. Our very presence as protestors is evidence of our belief in the possibility of instigating change. Of the 189 different methods of protest surveyed in The Politics of Nonviolent Action, pacifist Gene Sharp identifies twelve varieties of “physical intervention.” As distinct from strikes, boycotts, and symbolic public acts such as marches and theatricals, Sharp categorises sit-ins, walk-ins, pray-ins, and occupations as varieties of intervention “characterised by the interference created by people’s physical bodies.” Read more...

David Pledger

Year Zero

Let’s be bold. We need to develop not only an artistic dramaturgy and a cultural dramaturgy but a progressive, social dramaturgy. We need to operate cross-sectorally and think transversally. Read more...

Antonia Pont

Encountering Causalities

Watching Dance, Rituals of Spectatorship

And in fact, the image of unsuspecting audience members performing pre-determined, ritualised actions in a partially unknown context and without tangible benefit to the universe or the gods seems to resonate with the way we live our lives. Read more...

Betty Lefevre

Contemporary Dance and its Rituals: The Example of a work by Alain Platel

The contemporary dance performance belongs to a “romantic” sociality and to the “useless” activities that allow for sensed experience, a lived emotion, an imaginary, a meditation. Read more...

Roland Huesca

Nudity and figures of transgression at the end of the 20th century

In the 90s naked dancers created unheard of ways of living and feeling the body: sensitively, they offered a different kind of story where nudity, far from incarnating an ideal, appeared instead to propose a new sensory order. Read more...

Alison Croggon

Needling

Thinking and the making of meaning is commonly considered inconceivable without the word. Throughout western history, the ability to be articulate has been equated with consciousness itself, as the defining marker of humanity. Read more...

Anne Davier

Less Is More

Two dances, two choreographers, almost simultaneously, overturned my representation of dance, of the body and of interpretation. Read more...

Philipa Rothfield

The Future is Unknown, The Future is Past

While ‘we’ may not know what a body can do, we can nonetheless seek the body as that which will lead us into the future. Read more...

Jana Perkovic

Mobile Minds

Distinguishing between travellers and mere tourists is the great sport of our time, one that even travel anthropology will occasionally participate in. The tourist experience is inauthentic, mass-produced, second-hand, tame. They spoil places and experiences with their very presence. Every self- respected travel writer has raged against them. Read more...

DANCEHOUSE DIARY

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