But the world of Contemporary Performance has long since distanced itself from “drama” and practitioners of contemporary performance should be acknowledged for the work they do. Dancers and choreographers train for years, and continue to train every day, to master their bodies, enabling themselves to do extraordinary things. They deeply explore the nature of movement, the way bodies moving in space convey different meanings and experiences, point to different ideas. Directors work with dramaturges to develop intellectual frameworks around the experiences they create, around how to integrate the visual and auditory experience with the performance, how does all this point to ideas beyond the performed event? How does the physical representation of ideas on a stage or at a site loop back to the concepts with which they are engaged? This piece is doing the rounds on my fb feed. My 2c to add: * if the writer were from a dance background rather than theatre, there would be greater emphasis on the anxieties of script vs presence not only in spoken word performance but even in physical performance, and hence less likely to contrast object vs experience in such an easy way. Nevertheless, a useful formulation. * reference to Gesamtkunstwerk to describe the work of making performance was a bit embarrassing. Surely a more theoretically rigorous and contemporary reference could have been made.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 06:07:13 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015