The decline of choreography and its movement : a body's (path)way

Abstract

This doctoral artistic research project addresses the possibility of a dance withdrawn from that neoliberal scheme accordingto which self-performance, entrepreneurship and the production of subjectivity rule. Taking as a starting point the dissident corporealities that have emerged in the last fifty years in Western contemporary experimental dance; the project involvesaesthetic, philosophical and socio-political perspectives, carried out on choreographic, performative, textual, audiovisual, curatorial and discursive media. In late capitalism dance's commitment with the future (or its lack thereof) must find alliances with potentiality and nothingness. This is not a nihilistic affirmation, but an attempt to enable an interval: a dance whose value has to be apprehended there, where it is already happening. Kafka said that "one might have a goal, but not a pathway". The pathway involves a decisive cognition such that cannot be carried out without one becoming the path itself; without defying so to speak, the relationship of the dancer with dance itself. It is not about what the dancer can do, say or communicate in respect to dance, but what dance accounts for in itself. In modern's kinetic exhaustion, the latter is possible approaching dance as a presence-in-crisis. The semantic field of the word "crisis" and its associated words, –critical judgment, decision and separation–, defines the moment when something or someone has somehow one foot outside. The moment when one realizes that it is not the world that ends, but the linguistic constructions and the reality systems that had made sense until then. This proposal tries to embody that gap. It tries to reveal the somatic, kinetic, political and aesthetic implications whereby to dance on a limit that is both inaugural and terminal. Decisive. Although "deciding" will always be not knowing what will happen. It is a dance that, although it does not seem to mean anything, it does something. The moment at which dance let's go of being a product (a goal), to become a deposition. "Deposition" is a word that includes both, an abandonment and a position. At the same time, to take on a position implies a becoming: a (path)way through which the dancer coincides with dance's conditions. The moment at which the dancer abandons any intention to communicate, to propose or to interpret dance, to carry out kinetically and perceptually the non-significant, ephemeral, ineffable and impersonal conditions that dance implies as a presence-in-crisis. In short, the coincidence "dancer : dance" implies taking into account an experience of dance freedom that is fugitive. In the theatre apparatus, it involves a dancing which ―by lacking recognizable aims, signs and subjects― gives way to an aesthetic paradigm which is not be construed as aparticular kind of thing (a performance, a type of dancer, a subject, or even a social or artistic process), but rather as a gap's embodied experimentation. A threshold, a curve. A parenthesis. An eclipse. A void: the encounter with something which doesn't need to be produced, because it is already happening. ; The Documented artistic research project (Doctoral thesis) consists of: Exposition in Research Catalogue that includes:ECLIPSE : MUNDO (performance, 2018) To Dance in the Age of No-Future (Pdf. Essay; also as a Printed Publication, 2019) Laboratories (2011-2019) Performance Experiments (2011-2014) Solo Dances (2011, 2012) Video-Essay & Film experiment (2013, 2014, 2019) Curatorial Experiment (2013) and Festival (2014, 2015) This documented artistic research project (Doctoral Thesis) consists of three inter-related parts: first it invites the reader to see the performance'svideo ECLIPSE: MUNDO located on RC website. Afterwards, the reader isLanguage: English3invited to read the book To Dance in the Age of No-Future and get acontext regarding the rest of the audiovisual materials located on the samewebsite. The exposed materials are displayed as an "essay written form"understood in the Spanish or French sense of the Latin word ensayo /répétition and its associated meanings such as try-out, rehearsal, practice,study, preparation and experimentation. To this end, the materials show anongoing migration of concepts, practices and tools, through analogousforms, equivalences and contrasts, inviting to see this project's genealogiesand continuous iterations in formats such as video, testimonies, audios,scores, tool descriptions and images. Accordingly, it is the reader who –byviewing, listening to and reading these materials– can trace the diversekinetic, political, aesthetic, discursive and conceptual layers linked to thepractices and presentation formats specific to this doctoral research projectsince its beginning.