The Dancing Body Does Not Move Freely?

Issue #03: Less Is More

Our new Housemates are Atlanta Eke and Emma Kim Hagdahls who will work on the project NAME GIVEN 2: Body Lies. They share here some of the avenues they will investigate.

Email to someonePin on PinterestTweet about this on TwitterShare on StumbleUponshare on TumblrBuffer this pagePrint this pageShare on FacebookShare on LinkedIn

NAME GIVEN 2: Body Lies will be a cross-cultural collaborative practice experimenting with the idea of exhausting ‘knowns’ from the dancing body to produce ‘unknowns’. We want to develop a dance practice that insists on repetitively exhausting the references of dance choreography semiotics from our bodies. We want to find and make visible the habitual actions of categorisation, decoding and reading of movement in order to transgress them; in relation to the old something, new can be perceived.

NAME GIVEN 2: Body Lies will initially propose that the dancing body does not move freely. We want to shape an energetic and revealing dance practice investigating the movement of two dancing bodies as the product of a codified socialisation. Every movement made will be noted as a reference, a quotation, an illustration of a learnt behaviour, a product of training, technique, attitudes, images, characters, even narratives that fill the body enabling it to move.

It will be the recognition of all movement as reference as an archaeological investigation of two bodies made up of contemporary dance practices, dancing uniqueness and sharedness at the same time.

These references will be repetitively practiced with an obvious transparency acknowledging that movement exists as something non-abstract, therefore contesting the position of the ‘authors’ of the dance. The repetition of these references will be a simple strategy with the aim to produce something complex. Allowing us the space to notice how we perform and view movement – actions and views, which to a large degree is constructed by contemporary society. The practice of NAME GIVEN 2: Body Lies will eventually operate beyond the limitations inherent to references and categorisation of movement, exhausting the ‘knowns’ of the dancing body, transforming them into ‘unknowns’, new possibilities for the representation of the dancing body.

We think that the categorisation of movement in dance is representative of how society divides itself into categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, age, and ability in order to understand itself.

We want to challenge the conventions of how we create meaning out of movement. We want to facilitate a situation, a time and space, that makes visible habitual labeling and categorisation of movement in order to transform those categories, allowing for something ‘other’ to emerge. We want an emancipation or conscious navigation in relation to that production of meaning that, to a large degree, is constructed by contemporary society. We think that the categorisation of movement in dance is representative of how society divides itself into categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, age, and ability in order to understand itself. We want to imagine a world where categorical understandings, coding, stereotyping, limiting definitions and homogenising conformity is blurred, dissolved, and exhausted for a transgression into an unknown future, a future we do not yet have a name for.