This interdisciplinary book considers, questions, explores and problematises the relation between dance, visual art and performance. Relating to ongoing debates which draw together different fields of enquiry that connect the everyday world and the arts, it investigates the critical discourses and practices of dance and visual art: both the ways in which each field might situate itself within the discourses of the other and also how explorations of bodies, spaces and objects in contemporary visual arts and contemporary dance1 might speak to one another. Our interest is in interrogating these relations and their affordances: the new thinking (about both and their in-between relations) and the new practices that emerge from them.
The book itself emerged from a series of meetings between dance and visual arts scholars and artists that extended to two international symposia at Coventry University held in 2015 and 2016. Their focus was on the triad âbody-space-objectâ. In the spirit of the symposia that gave rise to it, and as its title suggests, this book seeks to present a dialogue between dance and the visual arts, with all of the chapters concerned in different ways with the social, embodied and perceiving body and how it performs within different forms of space.
Underpinning this book is the practice and the spaces within which these practices take place and are experienced. Movement, or the suggestion of movement, the relationship that we all have with the environment and the echoes, memories and rituals associated with these are fundamental to being socially and culturally human. Many of these rituals and projected meanings between humans, and humans and their constructed environments, engender and maintain a sense of belonging and are gradually accreted onto consciousness through repeated actions.2 They are crucial in the development of individual and social identity-building. The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, for instance, discussed how the world was inter-subjective and the relationship between consciousness and the material world is layered and interdependent. He argued that the world becomes reframed in the mind through memory and reflection.3 In his discussion of ontology as a process of individuation, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon proposed that the ontology of being is relational and that these (specific) relations amongst entities are ontologically pre-eminent.4 It is these immutable and apparently natural, and therefore overlooked, elements and relations that form the bedrock of many artistsâ and dancersâ practices.
This book focuses on two main themesâthe subjective, lived relations with objects and the social sphere, and the different approaches to absence, visibility and resistance. In selecting the contributions for this book, we considered how the different perspectives, experiences, writing approaches and registers of the authors could open up new thinking about dance and visual art, the relationship between the two fieldsâ respective discourses and practices, and the social and cultural relationships of people with their environments through them. The authors build on existing dialogues between, for example, public art and human geography, art, dance and memory studies, participatory practices and politics, and art and post-humanism, and engage with a wide range of theory from phenomenology to relational aesthetics to new materialism.5 Despite their diversity, these frameworks dialogue back and forth across the collection.
The chapters have all been written by specialists in their field and consider particular aspects from diverse cultures. They are by practitioners and dancers and historians and theorists. This allows for different forms of knowledge to be articulated. Some works relate to one genre, some blur the boundaries. Some are in the social world and others within institutionally framed settings.
The collection has, in part, been shaped by recent discourse on the presentation of dance within the museum and aims to further current debates.6 This book also addresses more recent developments in contemporary dance and art and developments that sit outside the Western canon which have been less well considered. For example, it offers a range of perspectives across different locations, including Central and Western Europe, Mexico and the United States. They reveal the interesting tensions and disruptions to established conventions and modes of working in different practices.
As early as 1992, Doreen Massey wrote that there have been huge structural, economic and political changes across the world during the previous few decades that had reshaped social relationships at every level.7 More recently, Wendy Brown suggested that neoliberal capitalism extends the logic of metrics to all areas of social life, which again has psychological, social, political and economic implications.8 At a time of social and political division and unrest, the themes and works discussed in this book have increased relevance as ways of reconsidering our relationship with the material and social worlds.
Background
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the relationship between dance and the visual arts was explored by artists and dancers in many ways, creating overlaps between theatre, music and art. The impact of Serge Diaghilevâs (1872â1929) âtotal theatreâ which brought together the leading choreographers, visual artists, composers and designers of the time, marked a move towards the theatrical integration of visual art and dance.9 Pablo Picasso, Henri Laurens and many other artists contributed to the sets and costumes of Diaghilevâs ballets. These experiences were important for their studio practices. Artists, dancers and theatre designers also collaborated in the work of Russian constructivists and the Bauhaus in Germany. In the United States, the work of choreographer Martha Graham (1894â1991) who collaborated with the sculptor/architect Isamu Noguchi (1904â1988), the filmmaker Maya Derenâs (1917â1961) pioneering âchoreocinemaâ project that started in the 1940s and explored links between dance, choreography and film and Merce Cunninghamâs (1919â2009) work with leading artists (notably Robert Rauschenberg (1925â2008), Jasper Johns (1930â), Andy Warhol (1928â1987) and composer and artist John Cage (1912â1992)) have all been profoundly influential, well documented and researched.
The permeable boundaries between different genres that were being developed since the 1960s were mirrored by the creation of arts centres in Britain from the 1970s, which frequently had spaces for performance, music and exhibitions. The Plymouth Arts Centre, Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham and the Riverside Studios in London, for instance, proved to be important venues for contemporary practices, especially those that were collaborative projects between artists and dancers. After the 1970s, these inter-genre projects were particularly welcomed by women sculptors, who sought to challenge the accepted hierarchies of art by using materials and means that were less gender specific.10 To collaborate and work in ways that were seen as on the margins was liberating. One of the works that reflected this thinking was Borders (1982), the collaborative dance and installation work by Kate Blacker and Gaby Agis, presented at the Riverside Studios. In Borders, the costumes of the dancers reflected the corrugated metal of the installation sets, crumpling and bending with the movements of the bodies. Their suggestion of buildings and urban spaces echoed the sets and costumes of Picassoâs Parade (1917).11 Later, choreographer William Forsythe (1949â) began a process of boundary blurring work that explored the interconnection between dance and visual arts. His large-scale installa...