Pulling down from the ephemeral

Abstract

The purpose of the Masters research project entitled ‘Pulling Down from the Ephemeral’, is to explore new choreographic processes and to further discourse around the making of performance. The project positions the author’s choreographic practice within, and in relation to, fields of dance, visual-arts and interdisciplinary practice.

‘Pulling Down from the Ephemeral’ is motivated from the perspective of a body-based practitioner and interest in the material capacities of the body. It focusses on choreography as a field of multiple energies and exchanges. Experimentation around how the body inhabits dance as a synthesis of temporalities and affections in time and space, accounting for both material and immaterial forces to converge and endure within a live performance as a living document. Specific concepts of ephemerality, materiality, energy, residue and ‘active presence’ in live performance are examined throughout the research. Discourse explored includes a reconfiguration of known spatial and durational frameworks for dance performance, examination of the slowing down of the body in choreography, and the body’s relationship to matter and the natural environment. Joan Chodorow’s description of the ‘psycho-physical’ impulse, as well as the notion of ‘moving and being moved’, is explored in the written thesis and as an important contribution to studio-based research. The work of contemporary choreographer Maria Hassabi and post-modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin are used to examine dance-based presentations across non-studio sites, gallery and natural environment contexts. Kathleen Stuart’s description of ‘Atmospheric Attunements’ is aligned with experimental perspectives in the the natural environment. This produces a more expansive view of how imagery and score meet to reposition the body as a primary material medium that draws from a multiplicity of material and immaterial interrelations, forces and embodiments.

The processes explored and detailed throughout this practice-led research project, document how somatic engagement and attention to ‘liveness’ support the generative capacities of the material body. The importance of the research lies in its potential to view choreographic work and performance as live, vital, enduring processes of exchange that actively continue to inform, rather than vanish.