Dance in the Gallery: Process and Memory Erin Brannigan
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invisible histories Mary Wycherley’s work, Invisible Histories presented in 2018 at Limerick Dance in the Gallery: City Gallery of Art, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art Carlow, West Process and Memory Cork Arts Centre and Void Contemporary Arts Centre Derry is in step with an international trend exploring the possibilities for choreography and dance when they enter the museum or gallery. Wycherley’s collaboration with Erin Brannigan sound artist La Cosa Preziosa and sculptor Rory Tangney is a performance designed for the gallery context, leaving no trace or remainder in the space and being adaptable to several such spaces. Early precedents for such work include Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961) at Reuben Gallery, and Deborah Hay’s 26 Variations on 8 Activities for 13 People plus Beginning and Ending (1969) and Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall (1970) both presented at Whitney Museum of American Art. Tese were one-of performances, some of which have since been recovered and re-performed in various remounts of work from this crucial period in the dance-gallery liaison. One associated phenomena deserving attention is the coopting and difusion of strategies and practices that have their provenance in dance throughout and across other media in the arts. Tis statement suggests a certain disciplinary integrity that certainly cannot be assumed in the contemporary art scene of the early 21st century. We could cite cases where exhibitions are described as being choreographed, artworks are only realised (once acquired by a collector) as group dances that require paid performers, and performance art that requires physically trained participants who can embody any number of nuanced gestures, complex sequences of movement, or feats of corporeal virtuosity. Disciplinary assertions are complicated in such cases, yet there is something to be gained for dance in insisting on some dance-based knowledges and processes that are easily disappeared in the historiographies of the experimental arts. Some of those elements might include the mind-body, singularity/collectivity, presence/participation, and process. If we can talk about “dance-based knowledges,” and if they might ofer a cue to understanding the current appeal of dance and choreography in the visual arts context, then one element that is central to dance and made its entry into the visual arts after the performative turn in the 20th mid-century 8 9 invisible histories 3 avant-garde is process. Process is the condition of being ongoing, incomplete arts, say, for the emergence of social formations and political maneuvers. For and relatively unstable. In the work of visual artists associated with the performer, academic and dramaturg Bojana Cvejić, “choreography stresses post-war, neo-avant-garde (the period of art that is seen as the provenance the design of procedures that regulate a process … . Tis resonates with of our postmodern, post-disciplinary period), we see the infuence of theatre choreographers’ and performance-makers’ current theoretical, self-refective (which would encompass music, performance and dance) on a new type of obsession with working methods, procedures, formats, and performance 4 art object that retains something of the processual in its fnal form. We can scores.” Te shift towards method over matter in dance, as in the other think, for example, of the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg that feature dirt, arts, began in earnest in the mid-twentieth-century milieu. Troughout this grass and mould which will change and transform across the life of the work period, choreographic process was thoroughly worked over, reinvented, and (for example, Dirt Painting [for John Cage] [1953]). In the feld of sculpture radicalized through aleatory processes, game structures, rules and limitations, we could consider A Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) by Robert and improvisation. Te legacy of this has had far-reaching efects. Parkinson Morris, which contains a recording of the sounds of the hammering, sawing writes that “contemporary dance is very good at creating original procedures. and sanding that were undertaken in its construction. Morris’ training with We are brilliant at fnding rules and limitations to specify what we do. We are 5 Anna Halprin, Rauschenberg’s collaboration with Merce Cunningham, and always making things up.” During the earlier period and up to the present Morris’ personal and professional relationships with Simone Forti and Yvonne the term ‘process’ has also been applied to other aspects of dance including Rainer exposed these artists to the most processual of the arts – dance. Tat practice and performance. Wycherley has brought together sound, sculpture and dance in her work Te strong afliation that the choreographic arts have with process connects her to this rich history of intermedial exchange and innovation. underlines the comparative material conditions of dance. Choreography is not reducible to a performance, while painting, for instance, can be the Process equivalent of a static, commodifed, singular object. Process is endemic to [Te dance] encounter cannot be “postponed” (diféré). It involves, in itself, the form and is something in which it excels. Improvised performance in any an experience/experiment of perceiving in space and time, an undergoing of media has claims to a special exhibition of process, collapsing composition this experience—on both sides. —Laurence Louppe1 3 See, for instance, my discussion of curator Mathieu Copeland’s use of choreography as a metaphor for curation in Brannigan (2015); “choreography is equated to the exhibited result of curating and organizing materials, bodies, space, temporal frameworks and potential for Process in a dance context is usually associated with composition or subjective feelings, perceptions, thoughts and memories that constitute the phenomena choreography, a stage of development that is invisibilised in a fnal, stable of the gallery exhibition” (“Choreography and the Gallery: Curation as Revision,” Dance outcome. As European-based dancer and choreographer Chrysa Parkinson Research Journal 47:1 [2015], p. 12). In Cvejić’s work on proceduralism and dance she 2 notes, “I registered three felds where choreography serves as a technical term [since 2000]: notes, “most processes are fnished once the piece is constructed.” In fact, molecular biology, information technology, and diplomacy.” (“Proceduralism,” in Parallel choreography has been used as an analogy for many processes resulting in Slalom: A Lexicon of Non-Aligned Poetics, edited by Bojana Cvejić and Goran Sergej Pritas both stable and unstable outcomes including curation, as well as beyond the [Belgrade; Zagreb: Walking Theory—TkH, 2013], pp. 239-240.) 4 Cvejić, “Proceduralism,” p. 240. 1 Laurence Louppe, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, translated by Sally Gardner (Alton, Hampshire: Dance Books, 2010), p.5. 5 Chrysa Parkinson, “We Make up What Matters to Us,” The Dancer as Agent Conference website, November 23, 2013, http://oralsite.be/pages/Dancer_As_Agent_About/. 2 Chrysa Parkinson, “Refecting on Practice,” in 6 Months 1 Location (6M1L), ed. Mette Ingvartsen (Everybody’s Publications, 2009), p.31. 10 11 invisible histories and performance, but also often blurring with methods of training or practice. So practice is both the ground for, and totality of, the work of the dancer- Beyond this special case, evidence of process is available in many forms across choreographer. It resists stabilization through naming, being a process that is the arts (amended manuscripts, brush strokes, technical virtuosity), but these continually changing and developing, and may have a special manifestation in 7 things are most often subordinate to a fnal, authoritative rendering or version. and through performance—both on and of stage. Here I am distinguishing For dance, there is a role for process in all facets of the medium: practice from choreographic process and performance as product. In this way • the ongoing process of technical and creative aptitude that requires it could be linked to training and technique; “habitual or regular activity” in 8 attention to a physical practice; Parkinson’s account. However, I do follow Parkinson in acknowledging the • the labour of composition which can require singular or collective efort codependence of the three felds of process in most dance artists’ working life over time and may remain open to change, i.e. remain in process within as a part of their dance practice. performance; and • the process of performance which can alter any stable or authoritative Composition choreography through context. For French dance theorist Laurence Louppe and others, dance is a process of restriction and restraint, a setting of limits upon the always already Practice expressive body. Tis could be applied to both predetermined and spontaneous Many dance artists see performances as windows onto an expanded choreographic composition. Louppe describes dance as “an art of subtraction situation that encompasses past, present, and future, and a gamut of activities 9 which ofers, said Laban, a restricted gamut of authorized motifs.” Choice- and degrees of perceptibility. Parkinson has written beautifully about dance making—as a form of restraint—is at the heart of dance composition; a practice; something she engages in and mentors others through. Asked to simple but important point given that any-movement-whatever describes the defne practice she states: broad feld of contemporary dance practices. Choice-making as a process can be determined