LINKING IMAGE AND BODILY DISPLACEMENT IN MODERN AND POSTMODERN DANCE

Almost not there.

This is how the woman danced.

She is tall with long limbs, she is not thin like a ballerina.

No , she has weight like a woman who has

borne children. She is pale among the stage light, 

Hair in a straight fall across her face. 

A translucent figure from

This distance. She is dressed in white. (Angela Seward p61)

They are free, but contained within their spatial temporal vigour,

Biting chunks of space in flight, step, fall, wheel, tilt, pause

to sliding-repose

He has depth and physicality, shades of lightness, strength. She infuses the moment with the physical largeness of her technical brilliance, slight though her stature.

They traversed a space of meaning’s form.

Ephemeral designs, icons of knowing- born in the moment of their death,

Binding their wisdom in the knowing of that moment ­ revisited again and over by the memory’s perceptions of those residing in that space. (Carolyn)

Crucial to a discussion of images of the dancing body is the potential of the body to be located within various discourses. But one of the paradoxes of human beings is the obvious and dominant fact that: we have bodies and we are bodies. ‘More lucidly, human beings are embodied, just as they are enselved. Our everyday life is dominated by details of our corporeal existence, involving us in a constant labour of nourishing, excreting, reproducing, grooming and sleeping. To neglect this regimen or corporal government is to invite disease, decay or disorder’.Brian Turner, in his embodiment of 

Social Theory argues that,

‘It is the connections of our bodies within our sociological contexts that lead to the constant reproduction of ideas, each with their manifest cultural political implications. Western thought has developed conceptions of physicality that have been cultivated primarily through moral and aesthetic physicality that have been cultivated primarily through moral and aesthetic philosophies. These would have us negate our bodies (particularly our reproductive functions). As the Christian moral apparatus of industrial capitalism is disappearing it is being replaced by the spread of mass consumerism. Contemporary culture has invented and continues to focus on new images of the body in popular and consumer culture’ (Brian Turner, p3).

This, Turner states is a consequence of the profound and long-term transformation of Western industrial society. In particular, the prominence and pervasiveness of images of the body in popular consumer culture are cultural effects of the separation of the body from the economic and political structure of society. The emphasis on pleasure, difference and playfulness that are features of contemporary consumerism are part of a cultural environment that has been brought about by the related process of postindustrialism and post modernism.

The nexus of these ‘isms’ are organised around the communication of signs and symbols. These exist within networks of omnipotent technologies that simultaneously transfix, but frequently disembody us. Are these machines extensions of our corporalities? What possibilities can we infer from their existence? And where, then do we capture, locate and mediate spaces for ourselves, our bodies in this climate?

I don’t set out to answer these questions, but by broaching the notion of artistic performance and the use of both physical and technological processes utilised to achieve them, we can examine, in our current social contexts, some of the complex threads that relate the contexts of bodies in performance.

This paper is primarily concerned with the ideology of the body in performance and the importance of reflection on how elements of image in arts disciplines are utilized and interacts in contemporary dance performance.

Bodies located in performance are not merely instruments for the expression or the reception of something else. Whilst they acknowledge that bodies always gesture towards other disciplines and times, their actuality lies in their ability to simultaneously instantiate both physical mobility and layers of meaning. Susan Bordo in her book, ‘Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,’ argues that, 

‘Bodies do not only pass meaning along, or pass it along in their uniquely responsive way. They develop choreographies of signs through which they discourse; they turn, or pivot from premise to conclusion through a process of reasoning; they confer with, bump, support, hold one another in narrating their own physical fate. How does the body, this corporeality, make meaning?’ (Susan Bordo, p 226-7)

What once might have seemed fairly represented, as a fragile suspension bridge, traversing the immeasurable gulf between body and mind, now seems more adequately represented as a busy super-highway, whose growing traffic is increasingly vital to our understanding of how humans make sense of their world.Within the discourse of the symbolic energy of bodies, choreography is the thinking discipline, the critical inscription of motion that informs and instructs the design of corporal meaning. It provides the means to rethink the way in which disciplines carry out their work. Susan Bordo suggests that: ‘Dance wends its way through history and culture as an analytical or metaphorical framework for discourse and subsequently provides a rich structure for any study of embodiment.’To illuminate a perspective of image and bodily image and its use in dance, I will examine some pertinent examples of dance movements in modernism that have affected their evolution and link this with image perception in contemporary dance practice.

To unearth the enigma of imaged perceptions of the dancing body in performance it is necessary to consider the layers of discourse accumulating around its site. The body can reveal multiple significations: biological, psychological and physiological, but these will be manipulated, masked, emphasised and encoded as they become embedded in a range of contextual discourses that deconstruct the body as a locus. Ironically, a dancing body encapsulates a totality of being; whose form negates discourse whilst simultaneously embodying it. The meanings in the physical language 

of the body remain embedded in sociological relationships with society’s structures and perceptions. This enigma of the dancing body and the multiple images it construes, implies or represents is the fundamental apotheosis of choreography and performance. 

Whether resolved as male or female, or as a combination of both, these discourses that construct our bodies are inscribed through patterns of social gesture, work, place, culture, through the training systems of performance and movement cultures, as well as through the ways that words or visual images chart conceptions of physicality. According to contemporary feminist critic Susan Suleiman, these identifications must take on the qualities of socio-political knowledge to free them from the structures of gender duality and hierarchy, which oversimplify them.In order to free the body from its stereotypic fictions, it is necessary to create an approach that addresses a combinatory scheme of possibilities, that is, ‘to invent incalculable choreographies’.

Susan Bordo argues that,

‘Metaphors of dance and movement have replaced the ontologically fixed stare of the motionless spectator. The lust for finality has been banished. The dream is of ‘incalculable choreographies’, not the clear and distinct ‘mirrorings’ of nature, seen from the heights of ‘nowhere’ (Susan Bordo, p227).

However, Bordo also suggests that the philosopher’s fantasy of transcendence has not yet been abandoned, as the historical specifics of the modernist, Cartesian version have simply been replaced by a new, postmodern configuration of detachment, a new imagination of disembodiment: a dream of being everywhere. This point can best be seen through examination of the role of the body, that is, the metaphor of the body in these (seemingly contrasting) epistemologies of ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’. For Cartesian epistemology, the body may be conceptualised as the site of epistemological limitation. Such limitations are those that fix the knower within determined corporal boundaries and therefore, both situate and relativise perception and thought. These strictures limit the possibilities of choreography as a metaphor. This perspective requires transcendence from these epistemologies if one is to achieve the view of ‘no-where’, or ‘everywhere’. Since the instrument of dance is the body, and the design of its meaning choreography, corporeal perceptions and displacement in contemporary dance performance acquire loci that necessitate multi-disciplinary inquiry to dissect and disseminate its meanings. 

‘Experience of the body even at the simplest level is mediated by a presentation of the body, the body image’ (Wolf, p81).

The readings of body image may be as many as there are viewers, in any performance or location where the body is prominent. These readings may also be moderated or overlaid by the views derived from a culture of the institution of dance and current perceptions of popular body culture.What may be viewed as a movement image located in a choreographic construction may also be dependant on the features of the choreographic conventions and the choices that are made in the performance site, all of which underscores the ways of seeing embedded in the performance. The trained muscle memory and degrees of lived experience in the forms of the dancing bodies resonates in the act and location of the performance. On the one hand they communicate the ideas embedded within the choreography and on the other, the attendant kinesthetic diversity of weight, energy and movement rhythms.

Through the responses experienced by the viewer, imbued with states of being, knowledge and education, we refer to the images of the body and perceptions of bodily form that may invoke stereotypical responses. Messages that come from media or other modalities of cultural surveillance tend to reinforce such stereotypes when placed in a performance site that throws bodies into high relief. Choreographers and dance artists are particularly sensitive to this and frequently sift choices of content and presentation. The need also to diversify responses to dancers’ body shapes is currently determined by the dancer’s skill and suitability to the role, rather than shape or size. Contemporary dance artists seek to articulate and critique stereotypic process and a response to body image to avoid reinforcing popular stereotypes. Yet the dancing body and the images relayed in the act of performance, or in the act of dance participation, contain a power that is constantly revisited in a cultural politics of corporal identity. Its location around contemporary practice of dance and of the body’s culture affords a discourse that captivates the imagination. This potential has motivated many artists and poets in the last century and a half.In this short paper I want to look briefly at those of the early modernist period, (1890 ­1920s), in order to focus on the new theories, not only of gender, place and balance, but also of seeing and interpreting dance performance, which emerged at this time. Dance artists of this period, in their drive for the creative realisation and articulation of their art also developed new forms of choreography and performance processes that have altered gender perception and translocated images of the body. A high point in this was the period of early modernism, during which avant-garde performers such as Loïe Fuller, Valentin St-Point and later, Isadora Duncan and Bronisalva Nijinska broadened the boundaries of choreographic and performance techniques and their attendant practices and philosophies. 

Within the period, 1890­1920, the culture of politics interacted with various socially driven movements in art and society to form the complex, fluid environment of the period. Imbedded in the artistic modes of Modernism were the changing definitions of the plastic arts and adventurous experiments that resulted in new and renewed perspectives of dance practice.

Fundamental to most questions about innovation in art and its location in the culture and politics of the modernist period, is the relationship between medium and message. It is this relationship that poets such as Mallarmè, Gautier and dance artists such as Fuller, St Point, Nijinska and Duncan explore in this period.

These dance artists examined modes of performance by considering choreographic methods and performance techniques that transposed the images of bodies in creative practice. A renewed discourse, one which challenged conventional notions of new performance technologies, artistic collaborations and gendered bodily image in dance practice was the outcome of modernist encounters. The articulation of this discourse can be illustrated by examining the writings of some poets of the period alongside the work of the dance artists themselves, as they sought to explore various locations of bodily placement in dance and performance according to the dominant tenet of modernism, which was, as Habermas has it, ‘to shape their arts according to their inner logic’.

This is clearly evidenced in the work of the writers of the Symbolist Movement, and their responses to the work of the innovative dancers of the time such as Loïe Fuller, who wove Symbolist images into her performance. Stéphane Mallarmè, for example wrote frequently about the work of Loïe Fuller, extrapolating her performances in terms of the medium of her dance and the messages they conveyed. For Mallarmè the problem of the contemporary theatre was one of ‘monstrous mediocrity’ and of the ‘inadequate and primary ways of seeing of both audiences and artists’. Mallarmè’s focus on Loïe Fuller the dancer reveals the extent to which her work and the nature of the dancing body in that work shaped his own aesthetic theory and poetic practice. Fuller’s dances illustrated those organic images, primitivistrepresentations of flower, fire or storm, which are core constituents of the symbolist purity of Yeat’s and other late romantics. A high valuation was placed in this period on the image-making powers of the mind at the expense of the rational powers. Organicist images were substituted for mechanistic modes of thinking about works of live art.Frank Kermode, in his foundational account of the development of the ‘Romantic Image’ quotes Stephen Daedalas in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reasoning that,

’ The nature of the ‘aesthetic image’.....was apprehended as one thing, self bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which it is not’ ( Kermode, p1).

Fuller represented these symbolic images through experimentation with movement produced by activating voluminous silks on bamboo wands in the different angles and colours of light beams. Her dancing body was veiled with fabric and through the choreographed movement of the wands, she created the illusion of those images evocative of light usage employed by the Impressionists, the Symbolists and by the exponents of Art Nouveau. Her work also reflected early experimentation with film as in the phantasmagoria and magic lantern shows. These avant-garde dances were performed in a comparatively bare space, a technique that threw the dancing body and its fantastic images into high relief. Mallarmè based his theory on the understanding and inspiration of Fuller, the dancer as:

‘not a woman dancing, for the juxtaposed causes that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summarising one of the elementary aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower, and that she does not dance.....’ (McCarren, p220).

According to Felicia McCarren, unlike other commentators of the time, this passage disregards both the dancer’s gender and her technique in favour of her identification as a metaphor. ‘A close examination of both Fuller’s dances and Mallarmé’s writing about them reveals that it is Fuller’s technique of changing her bodily shape through the use of draperies and light which suggests to Mallarmé the genderless, semiotic subjectivity which he also applies to the poet’. Fuller’s approach considered dance beyond the sphere of technique and the trappings of performance, by interpreting the location of movement whilst simultaneously illuminating a theory of physical mobility and its layers of meaning. In her autobiography, ‘Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life’, (1913), Fuller wrote:

‘What is the dance? It is motion.

What is motion? The expression of a sensation.

What is a sensation? The reaction in the human body produced by an impression or an idea perceived in the mind… The mind serves as the medium and causes these sensations to be caught up by the body… To impress an idea I endeavour by my motions, to cause its birth in the spectator’s mind, to awaken his imagination, 

That it may be prepared to receive the image…’ (sic, p54)

By motion, Fuller meant not only the dancing body but also the movement of light, colour and silk. In order to achieve the effects created by the bamboo wands, Fuller had to explore and develop new ways of moving arms, legs and torso. This required tremendous strength and fitness, as well as an ability to interpret and develop new movement concepts to create a movement form specific to her new style. What she achieved, in essence was the corporeal displacement of herself and her fabrics as a huge screen, which she moulded into fantastic shapes and forms evocative of early motion picture performances. This, together with her innovative choreography expanded and developed a new modernist dance and performance genre.

Fuller’s innovative experimental form of dance theatre combined a location of the performance medium and its accompanying message, in response to the growing focus on individualism and expressionism. She had transferred the technique of dance from the codified form of ballet with all its social implications into a form that blended symbolist images into a foregrounding or projection of them onto her body. Fuller’s techniques which so affected Mallarmé, prompted his new way of seeing, his ‘poet’s gaze’. This power of the dancer/performer was to also to inspire, as is illustrated by the Symbolist dramas of Yeat’s and Maeterlinck and the staging experiments of the abstractly lit scenery of Appiah and Craig, (during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They worked to also to impart a new mode of seeing in the theatre. 

Delving further into Mallarmé’s exposition of the dancer it becomes apparent that he distances Fuller as a metaphor for disembodiment. He locates the dancer’s objectivity between her feminine appearance, the body onstage, and a mimed object. The subject of her dance [and the content of what is represented by the dance] is layered upon the object represented by the dancer’s presence. The question raised is that of artistic significance and the artist’s subjectivity. Loïe Fuller was both the object and subject of her own artistic creations. She was at once creator, choreographer and designer of both costumes and lighting effects as well as performer.She, the artist, was therefore the female embodiment of both the art form and the artistic conception, provoking an intriguing paradox. In her work it is impossible to distinguish a signified content from a signifying body, (an organic representation) and the dance itself is also both content and the act of producing that content. Mallarmé’s treatise of Fuller’s enigmatic dances can be compared with Yeats’ response to such performances. Yeats’ theory of the aesthetic image expressed the idea that proportion, movement and meaning, were not intellectual properties, but belonged to the imagination, which generates a symbolic mode of perception. According to Yeats, the beauty of a woman, in her shape or bodily form, more particularly when in motion, became the emblem of the work of art. Frank Kermode observes that Yeats’ poetry of the dancer represents the aesthetic image of unified body and soul in which,

‘All dreams of the soul end in a perfect woman’s body. Beauty is the perfectly proportioned body conceived by the viewer as form and essence; perceived ahead of passion. In this, what mattered to Yeats was the concrete, unique, symbolic object, the living, unified body, defying explanation or paraphrase, as these are merely agents of intellect’ (Kermode, p54).

Yeats encapsulated this paradox of the aesthetic image represented by the dancer in‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, he asks, ‘How can you tell the dancer from the dance?’

The responses of these poets indicated that Fuller was very present in shaping tastes in the art world of her day. Her performances epitomised the spirit of early modernism, and reflected that organic purity of form revealed in Yeats’ ‘Romantic Image’. The enigma of Fuller’s performance as resolved by Mallarmé and Yeats in their poetic theories, reveals a cyclic re-creation of the writer’s (performer’s) subjectivity along the lines of that of the dance, taking form as a:

‘de individuated, disappearing or dead poet, performing a number of roles and yet, never entirely present in any one of them’ (McCarren, p221).

This view encapsulates the ephemeral nature of the dance - the act of performing through the instrument of the body, located within a time-spatial locus of itself. 

Fuller who in her experiments, which simultaneously dissolved the boundaries of choreography and performance whilst combining innovations in theatre technology, shaped a new approach to performance. Mallarmé answered with his dissertations on perceptions of performance. 

Another performer who also transcended the boundaries of performance identity in a context, which de-emphasized both subjectivity and dualism, was Futurist, Valentin St Point. She like Fuller, presented an abstract choreography, but her dance was metaphysical in that it aimed to reveal pure thought without sentimentality or sexual overtones. St Point fragmented all conventional and modernist images of dance and of the woman. Her dance presented the tenets of sexual cultural policy (according to a Futurist Manifesto), and is best described as ‘rejecting gender norms and eluding the mimetic quality of dance depending on music as an analogy of women depending on men.’ (Franko p22). Reminiscent of Mallarmé’s description of Loïe Fuller, St-Point desexes herself to gain direct access to the essential idea of theatrical performance, as a serious mode of symbolist expression.She wrote of the dance as, ‘but a plastic art -- an exoteric materialisation, a bodily rhythm, instinctive or conventional --- being separate of music -- As ‘Music is an aestheticisation of sentimentality’, (St Point from Franko, p22).

St Point did not set out to reflect the nuances of a world that had redistributed its sexual politics as a result of the unprecedented emphasis on the effects of modern, urban industrialisation. Her project was to embody futurist ideology’s metaphor of the creative construction of a future. Within the newly emerging class-consciousness of movements such as Futurism, a desire to give social relevance to this new order was seen in creative avant-garde endeavours like those of St-Point. Her choreography dramatises no transgressive position of gender polarity. She represents herself in ‘metachorus’ as both genders and neither. Dressed as a warrior, her face veiled and thus permanently absent for her performance, her choreography conceived an abstract, immaterial dance that set out to embody pure thought without sentimentality and sexuality. These latter are what the ‘Manfesto of the Futurist Woman’ admonishes her to abandon. St Point accompanied her performances, entitled Poems of Love, Poems of War, poems of atmosphere in front of large cloth hangings, lit with colour. Mathematical equations were projected onto other walls, whilst a background of music by Satie and Debussy was played.

The Futurist manifesto provided the blue-print for the form and style of St Point’s stylized choreography that was influenced by the Futurist ideology of liberating audiences, intellectual circles, stagnating codes of style, technique and form from old, static, pacifist and nostalgic declamation. St Point’s interpretations of this manifesto, like those of, Fuller cognetised both the object and subject of her own artistic creations.

Both Fuller and St Point came from a background of variety theatre, whose conventions configured a mixture of dance, film, song, acrobatics and satire. The authors, performers and technicians of variety theatre were, in that tradition, frequently pushing audiences to new areas of intelligence and ‘incessantly inventing new elements of astonishment’ (Marinetti, from Goldberg p13 ). 

I see resonances evocative of the modernist innovations of Loïe Fuller and Valentin St Point in the work of contemporary dance. Choreographers apply post modernist processes such as the utilisation of bare spaces and technology, in which dancing bodies are thrown into high relief, blended with light and frequently employed filmic image. These images are reflected through the choreographic deployment of contemporary dance and movement technique, frequently accompanied by voice, electronic or live sound-scape and choice of performance location, all of which serve to exemplify a multidimensional performance of industrially and culturally charged, technological messages. Both these dance artists through their innovations in corporal epistemologies have demonstrated new interpretations for dance as a cultural practice that cultivates disciplined and creative bodies. The early dance innovators and choreographers have inscribed and continue to sign the body in distinct and distinctive ways, projecting other cultural and political possibilities for dance and other art forms through the body. Modernist innovators like Fuller; St Point and others pioneered a strong female-centered movement, both with respect to the manner in which the dancing body was deployed and represented as well as in the imagery and subject matter employed. These dance artists explored new methods of using the body in dance, along with a questioning of the place and context of dance, dissolving conventional dance images through symbolist and ideological representation, paving the way towards ‘incalculable choreographies’ - metaphors of choreography. In this spirit, choreography begins to adopt a thinking process that orders and situates dance performance within its contexts.

A subsequent manifestation of these practices was that dance, within the political fusion of modernism and in response to major shifts in European politics, began to be subversive in its questioning and its exposure of the body and its images in cultural contexts. This process provided shifts in the emphases of bodily discourses or ways of de emphasising the perceptions of romantic and gendered body image in dance practice inherited from ballet and modernist paintings. 

Postmodern performances continue to reflect elements of these crucial early modernist experiments, deconstructing a theoretical shifting of the grounds and identities in which bodies moved and still move. Bodies provide the critical grid or schema through which disciplinary and artistic endeavours are deconstructed and in our postmodern climate, are now capable of being ‘written’ through performance disciplines. Postmodern art does not set out so obviously to shock the populace, or stage a blueprint for social change as modernist art did, in the spirit of St Point’s Futurist metaphor or Fuller’s Symbolist forms. Instead, it critiques, redefines and comments upon aspects of the human condition, deconstructing the ethics and values of social and cultural connections and constructs ­ it takes no immediate responsibility for change.

What then have Euro-American postmodern dance productions gleaned, borrowed or echoed, from the spirit of modernism and how do we seek to use them? The vestiges of these experiments continue today - that is, the exploration, which enables dance artists to continue to change the object of dance itself. These ‘objects’ combine modern dance, (Graham, Cunningham, Skinner techniques) other movement techniques such as yoga, martial arts, non-European cultural dance forms (Classical Indian, Asian, South American, African) and everyday movement in collaborative performances, frequently overlaid with other arts and technology that constitutes the diversity of contemporary dance.

At the same time, for feminist artists especially, tactical and political intervention is a necessity in order to reject the old opposition of theory and practice. Barthes and Levi-Strauss have led artists and others to reflect on culture as a body of codes or myths and imagined resolutions to real contradictions; so a dance, poem or painting is less an ‘artefact’ or a ‘work’ in modernist terms, unique, symbolic. Instead it becomes a text in a postmodern sense, already written, allegorical, contingent upon its sociological context.

The piece shown during the conference presentation grew out of previous work in which I explored the spaces of three rooms.During this process I became increasingly interested in liminal spaces such as staircases, roofs and verandahs which define and dissolve the boundaries between fixed loci.These notions reflect my thesis research in tracing and dissolving defined images of the body, which are often trapped in discourses of power, gender, race etc and within traditional aesthetics of the dance, which emphasised fixed roles and limiting boundaries for human identities. In the current piece I have taken these often vertiginous liminal spaces (such as staircases and ladders) as locales for an exploration of the idea of edges which represent spaces of danger and imbalance, where the choices we make of identity and emotion lead us to the edge of our self-conceptions.

The piece entitled Liquid Vertigo, incorporated themes that emphasise interaction between the real and the virtual, reflecting the current preoccupation with defining our sense of reality. The metaphor of vertical location and the idea of vertigo explored both. It was designed to work through these metaphors to illuminate the personal meanings of the dance and movement. 

Representational and real images are projected onto the performance space; the real dancers dance in different locations within the performance area and interact to a degree with the projected images. The audience is invited to travel part of the space with the dancers, reflect on or question personal relationships in the interactions caused by the conjunction of space, image and reality. In this, the performance also takes on a ‘filmic’ quality. The theme of vertigo draws on the fear of heights in the real and the metaphorical sense and is employed to integrate the measured and uneasy interactions within the complex contemporary climate of change, its effects on relationships and their interactions in the piece. Reactions to heights are varied. For some, they evoke dizzying sensations; others are drawn to the challenge and sense of freedom they afford. These sensations are explored in narrow spaces of confinement, hence, the stairwells and ladders. The audience is brought into viewing positions where they either look up or down on the performers. The performance begins outside, then moves to an internal stairwell, where all are brought into close proximity with each other in, and around the studio for short periods. The dancers then lead all into the studio for the remainder of the performance, where they can watch seated from a conventional perspective. 

Dancers were of three distinctly differing heights. Their individuality as dancers and people was emphasised, allowing them to express their personalities through the performance. The work developed as collaboration, with improvisation contributing to the interpretation of thematic material and the making of the choreography. Discussions and reflections on the meaning and use of the space were crucial to the work. The choices made in developing this performance work-in-progress were designed to expose and dissolve views of the body and its images. By placing the performance in vertical and other spaces, I seek to reveal multiple significations of the body: to focus the dancing bodies both as loci of meaning and also as dependent on the sites of their performance. The video images employed served to draw connections with contemporary culture to reflect the location of bodies within various discourses. Text was employed to echo or reiterate meanings. I used shadow play in conjunction with the choreography, video and sets to create an atmosphere evocative of early film images and unreality, the dancers moving in and out of loosely choreographed sequences, with movement from lyrical to pedestrian. 

The meanings in the physical language of the body remain embedded in sociological relationships with society’s structures and perceptions. Performance, dance in particular, is ephemeral in nature. By blending technical images, both still and moving with the dancing bodies, the dance is layered by other meanings. The body is shifted in and out of representation, allowing an extension of the body’s meaning through interpretations of reality, a multiplicity of choreographies. We see a performance and recapture those spaces, layered with multiple meanings and transformed by the imagination.This enigma of the dancing body and the multiple images it construes, implies or represents is the fundamental apotheosis of choreography and performance in contemporary practice.

Carolyn Griffiths

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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