In Tact?

Berührungen spielen im Tanz eine zentrale Rolle: Durch sie werden Motionen und Emotionen übertragen – und auch unterbrochen, gestört. Taktilität reguliert und de/synchronisiert „bodies in tact“. Im Folgenden soll anhand von Beispielen aus dem Bereich des Postmodern Dance (Trisha Browns Spanish Dance) und des zeitgenössischen Tanzes (Meg Stuart & Philipp Gehmachers Duo Maybe Forever) gefragt werden, wie Choreografien mit inter- und intrakorporalen Synchronisierungen arbeiten. Welche Modi des in oder aus dem Takt Tanzens werden sichtbar? Lassen sich – im zeitgenössischen Tanz – Hinweise auf eine Reflexion des Phänomens der „berührungslosen Gesellschaft“ (Elisabeth von Thadden) finden?

Amy Seiwert

This chapter describes the career of Amy Seiwert, a Bay Area choreographer who, over a period twenty years, moved from neoclassical ballerina to full-time contemporary ballet choreographer with a desire to reformulate the classical dance lexicon. Her goal was to create dances, as well as dance practices, that could maintain the beauty of the classical language while reflecting and commenting on the realities of contemporary life. Thanks to the experimental dance scene in San Francisco, California, she eagerly exposed herself to the many choreographic tools long familiar in contemporary and postmodern dance. These included improvisation, scoring, movement games, and aleatory processes, all of which are organized forms of play. Play, and the agency and daring it requires, brought forth new, imaginative embodiments of movement problems and strategies for Seiwert; through them she has been able to address pressing social and existential questions and prove contemporary ballet’s relevance to the twenty-first century.

James Kudelka

James Kudelka glides comfortably between the worlds of ballet, modern dance, and postmodern dance. As one of Canada’s most prolific choreographers, he has a repertoire that bridges classical and contemporary modes as he moves skillfully between revisiting classical behemoths such as Swan Lake and creating entirely new works driven by his masterful relationship to music and his ability to push the boundaries of ballet vocabulary and partnering. This chapter contextualizes Kudelka’s work within the historical narrative of ballet in Canada and his impact on the repertoires of the National Ballet of Canada and Les Grands Ballet Canadiens. Kudelka’s dominant themes of love, sex, and death; his vocabulary and strong emphasis on artistic collaboration; and his musical awareness are all crucial elements of his creative process and are integral to his exploration of the human condition through ballet.

Dancing in the Modus of Self-Identification

The main idea of the article is to address the phenomenon of dancing as a type of creative activity in the modus of self-identification. Sociocultural (self-)identification within the framework of art is taken as the process and space of forming an outline — personal and collective — in relation to certain groups of values, norms and traditions, as a way to discover the boundaries of reflexivity and the possibility of their representation in an artistic act. Basing on the interpretation of reflection as self-directed thinking, this article solves the problem of showing the potential of art in general, and dancing in particular, in the aspect of formation and preservation of identity parameters. The identity is considered as the result of constructing metaphysical supports and methods of self-representation in the widest range: national, religious, ideological, gender, but above all — the actual artistic-stylistic one. In addition to the obvious value of beauty and harmony, the article highlights expressiveness and authenticity as the main axiological guidelines for the art of choreography. The author analyzes the high communicative potential of dancing as a type of artistic activity both at the professional and amateur levels. The article focuses on the specifics of self-identification procedures in the space of modern dance, interpreted in this context in a wide chronological field — from the emergence of “free dance” by Isadora Duncan to current trends in postmodern dance, “contemporary dance” and performative practices. The study concludes that dancing has a high axiological potential as an artistic activity that combines physical and metaphysical practices.

Bildaktivism i dansarkivet: Betydelsen av Anna Wikströms Akademi för dans

The article combines Critical Archival Studies theory about agency and activism with an empirical exploration of dance history in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. It focuses on Anna Wikström’s Academy for Dance (1930-1965), an education which has not been explored in previous research. A previous member of The Swedish Ballet, Wikström offered her students courses in artistic dance, dance as physical exercise, pedagogy, and social dancing. Thereby, her broad education differed from the narrow, elitist Ballet School at The Stora Teatern. The article accounts for how the collaboration between choreographer and dancer Gun Lund and Astrid von Rosen, scholar at the University of Gothenburg, contributes new knowledge about the local dance culture. It is argued that archival and activist approaches make it possible for more voices, bodies, and functions to take place in dance history. As such, the exploration complements previous postmodern dance historiography (see for example Hammergren 2002; Morris och Nicholas 2017) with a Gothenburg example.

Rethinking Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes: Postmodern Dance, Racialized Urban Restructuring, and Mid-1960s San Francisco

While choreographer Anna Halprin’s work has been characterized as embodying the cultural ethos of the New Left, it is also aligned with the race and class interests that spearheaded urban renewal in San Francisco. Contextualizing Halprin’s Parades and Changes in relation to political and economic developments during the 1960s suggests the work’s contradictory affiliation with both an urban elite and utopian countercultures.