Jonathan Burrows

Towards a Minor Dance

Daniela Perazzo Domm

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030276805
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Dance

The first monograph on the work of British choreographer Jonathan Burrows, this book examines his artistic practice and poetics as articulated through his choreographic works, his writings and his contributions to current performance debates. It considers the contexts, principles and modalities of his choreography, from his early pieces in the 1980s to his latest collaborative projects, providing detailed analyses of his dances and reflecting on his unique choreomusical partnership with composer Matteo Fargion.
Known for its emphasis on gesture and humour, and characterised by compositional clarity and rhythmical patterns, Burrows' artistic work takes the language of choreography to its limits and engages in a paradoxical, and hence transformative, relationship with dance's historical and normative structures. Exploring the ways in which Burrows and Fargion's poetics articulates movement, performative presence and the collaborative process in a 'minor' register, this study conceptualises the work as a politically compelling practice that destabilises major traditions from a minoritarian position.

© The Author(s) 2019

D. Perazzo DommJonathan BurrowsNew World Choreographieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27680-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Dance and/as Poiesis, Poetry, Poetics

Daniela Perazzo Domm¹

(1)

Department of Performing Arts, Kingston University London, Kingston upon Thames, UK

Daniela Perazzo Domm

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Poiesis as ‘Non-making’: Weak Dance Strong Questions (2001)

The performance space is a studio theatre with mobile seating, where the spectators are arranged in a semicircle. As they enter, Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema, in everyday clothes and sturdy shoes, welcome the audience, offering information about the title and the duration of the performance and handing out additional chairs or cushions to the latecomers. The house lights are on and are never lowered for the whole fifty minutes of the piece. Almost unnoticed, in keeping with the informal tone of this introduction, they start to move and thus begin their dance. The two men become engaged in movements without creating phrases or recognisable patterns; there is no identifiable rhythm to their manoeuvres, no deliberate relation with the space and with each other, neither at a point in time nor through time. Nevertheless, the overall even distribution of the pace and intensity of the activity and the sense of ease in the lack of formal interaction between Burrows and Ritsema speak of an attentive awareness of their relational presence. They proceed steadily, yet through fragmentary actions, variously inhabiting the space—walking, standing, shuffling, stepping, turning, crouching, hopping, sitting, crawling, pausing. Their movements seem to test balance and the force of gravity, explore unfamiliar qualities and speeds of motion, as though to challenge socially constructed bodily gestures and actions. They look pensive or smile as they bend, hold, tilt, stretch, stiffen, loosen, flex, jerk, lift, cross, twist, rotate or tangle different body parts: legs, arms, torsos, necks, hands. Possibilities seem endless, yet the range they explore has an ordinary feel: although unusual for a dance performance, their movements do not aim for extremes, do not show off particular skills. The performers present themselves as two of us—even though we admire their focus, their stamina and their seemingly inexhaustible curiosity about movement and its functioning (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema in Weak Dance Strong Questions (2001)

(Photograph by Herman Sorgeloos)

I wrote this description of Weak Dance Strong Questions (2001) after seeing the performance in September 2003 in Milan, as part of the inaugural programme of ‘Uovo Performing Arts Festival’, a platform for cutting-edge performance and choreography I collaborated with. It was the first work by Burrows I ever saw and it became the seed for the research that has led to this book. As a theatre and performance researcher and professional, at the time I was already familiar with experimental practices. Dance, however, was fairly new to me and this piece gestured to an idea of it that was significantly different from conventional understandings of this art form. The piece is an improvised duet in which Burrows, a professional dancer and choreographer, works alongside the Dutch theatre director Ritsema, who is not trained in dance. As the title suggests, the work is a radical interrogation of dance, of its modes and possibilities. It was described by international reviewers as featuring ‘movement combinations which are not normal, either in everyday life or in any dance style’ (Staude, 2001) and was depicted as ‘a piece which consists only of interruptions’, in which ‘every movement is taken back just at the moment that it is executed’ (Siegmund, 2001). About the choreography, British dance critic Judith Mackrell (2001: 16) wrote that it offered ‘no story, no discernible structure and absolutely no virtuoso gloss. […T]here’s no obvious development of the material and no formal linking between the two performers’.

In a published interview, Burrows (2002: 25) defined the piece as being about ‘questioning ’ and ‘non-making’, about avoiding given formulas and ‘coming to the audience with empty hands’. When I met up with him in 2004 to talk about the work (I had, by then, moved to London and started the research that underpins this monograph), he told me that the creation of the piece was organised around three tasks that both performers were to respond to: to move as though in a state of questioning; not to negotiate time and space; to be connected to the other person (Burrows, 2004). In the work, movement is understood as a way of asking questions: it embodies a continuous doubting and looking for possibilities and does not resolve into fixed steps or gestures. Nevertheless, since the constant state of questioning never allows any movement/question to be completed/answered, ‘the piece has choreographed itself moment by moment and has also acquired a particular style’ (Burrows, 2004). By emptying the dance, through the questioning of given forms and rules, the process allows the work to be filled with new possibilities. A paradox: filling by emptying, a production by subtraction, a way of making—a poiesis—by non-making.

In the Aristotelian categorisation of human activity, poiesis indicates production, the act of making—from the ancient Greek poieîn, to make. As distinguished from praxis (practice), which designates an act that is complete in itself, poiesis is an activity whose aim exceeds the activity itself: it is a bringing-forth, it invents, it forges, it creates. In this book, I assume the idea of poiesis as a starting point to interrogate the paradoxical possibilities of Burrows’ invention by subtraction, making by non-making. I engage with the ‘practice of simultaneous composition and decomposition’ his choreography is predicated upon—to borrow the words that Daniel Heller-Roazen (2005: 193) uses to propose an understanding of poetry. In fact, as I write elsewhere (Perazzo Domm, 2017),¹ the word poiesis is also connected etymologically to the terms poetics, poetic, poetry. These concepts become entangled in my discussion of the work—as I ground my analysis in my curiosity for dance and/as language.

Writing about Weak Dance Strong Questions, performance theorist and dramaturg Bojana Cvejić (2015: 149–151) premises her discussion of the piece on ‘an analogy between dancing and speech’, while also acknowledging that ‘the sense in dance can’t be compared with linguistic meaning’ and that such a ‘comparison […] presupposes an approximation between two disparate expressions’. Her perspective is invoked in the discussion of Burrows’ po(i)etic(s) (of) dance articulated in this book. In earlier configurations of my research on Burrows (Perazzo Domm, 2007), I moved from the literary notion of poetry and poetic language—drawing on Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva and Gérard Genette—to the examination of its philosophical underpinnings—via Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thesis on the speculative dimension of poetry. In the present book, as the following paragraphs outline, I engage with Burrows’ dance as a po(i)etic practice, while also examining its poetics, its distinctive mode of thinking (about) dance.

A Po(i)etic(s) (of) Dance

This monograph imagines Burrows’ work as danced poetry and investigates the performance poetics his choreography has articulated through three decades of choreographing, dancing, collaborating, researching, mentoring and writing. The book argues that Burrows’ creative methods—his compositional rigour and interest in clear structures, his collaborative approach and his paradoxical exploration of the possibilities of choreography—mobilise ways of rethinking dance’s critical and political positioning in the contemporary moment. I propose that, by challenging the normative grammar of choreography, Burrows’ work also resists established artistic and social paradigms, reconceptualising individuation and community through process and performance. As the first full-length monograph on Burrows’ choreography, the book also aims to historicise his work in relation to its contexts of reference and to document his pieces through detailed (yet necessarily unexhaustive) commentaries, which draw on an attentive response to the works as well as on extensive archival research and on a substantial corpus of first-hand interview material. The specificities of Burrows’ creative approach demand a critical and theoretical perspective that valorises the way in which the significance (artistic, historical and political) of the dance is articulated through the distinctiveness of its aesthetic choices.

The association of dance with poetry and poetics finds compelling and varied articulation in dance and performance scholarship, with important contributions that move between writing and dancing, addressing the creative possibilities of their interaction. It is in the company of these conceptualisations of dance and/as language that I co-imagine Burrows’ po(i)etic(s) (of) dance. For instance, Burrows’ own dialogical writing with Adrian Heathfield (a series of exchanges in epistolary format published in the journal Choreographic Practices in 2013) draws on their extended conversations about the relationship between movement and writing in the context of contemporary dance. Here Burrows and Heathfield interrogate the...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Dance and/as Poiesis, Poetry, Poetics
• 2. Resisting from Within: Dance Canons and Their Deterritorialisation
• 3. Reduction, Repetition, Returns: The Trouble of Minimalism
• 4. Rhythm as Friendship: Movement, Music and Matteo
• 5. Duets and (Self-)portraits: Choreographing the Im/personal
• 6. Choreographies of Plurality: Rethinking Collaboration and Collectivity
• 7. Towards a Politics of Poetry, Gesture and Laughter
• Back Matter