!Choreography is Dead. Long Live Dance _ Stage _ Theguardian
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12/4/13 Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/stage/dance-blog/2013/nov/27/choreography-is-dead-long-live-dance?CMP=twt_gu 1/5 Search Work that is asking questions … Tino Sehgal with participants in his Turbine Hall piece These Associations. Photograph: Johnny Green It's nearly half a century since American choreographer Yvonne Rainer announced the death of traditional dance values, in her famously radical "No" manifesto of 1965. Rainer's opening statement: "No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image" spoke for a generation of choreographers who were questioning the limits that had been placed on what kind of movement, what kind of performance could rank as dance. Over the years, that questioning ethos drove a wave of experiment, from minimalist Sign into the Guardian using your Facebook account Choreography is dead. Long live dance Questions are being asked by dancers and dance-makers about the boundaries of the art form. Which is cause for excitement
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12/4/13 Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com
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Work that is asking questions … Tino Sehgal with participants in his Turbine Hall piece These Associations.
Photograph: Johnny Green
It's nearly half a century since American choreographer Yvonne Rainer announced the
death of traditional dance values, in her famously radical "No" manifesto of 1965.
Rainer's opening statement: "No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations
and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image"
spoke for a generation of choreographers who were questioning the limits that had been
placed on what kind of movement, what kind of performance could rank as dance.
Over the years, that questioning ethos drove a wave of experiment, from minimalist
Sign into the Guardian using your Facebook account
Choreography is dead. Long live danceQuestions are being asked by dancers and dance-makers about
the boundaries of the art form. Which is cause for excitement
12/4/13 Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/stage/dance-blog/2013/nov/27/choreography-is-dead-long-live-dance?CMP=twt_gu 2/5
works that were constructed out of ordinary pedestrian moves to multimedia dance
theatre, deploying an eclectic sprawl of dance, gesture, text and props.
Blurred boundaries …
Yvonne Rainer's Choreographing You. Photograph: Lawrence Burns
Eventually Rainer's manifesto became absorbed into the mainstream of dance
performance, but the combative undercurrent of her argument didn't go away. For
instance, at a recent symposium organised by Bellyflop magazine, Antje Hildebrand
contributed a "Provocation" titled The End of Choreography, whose theme included a
meditation on what choreography might look like if it was detached altogether from the
idea of dance and even from performance.
Hildebrand argued that if the term "choreography" is defined as a form of structured
activity then it might be applied to anything from the flocking of birds to the
orchestration of political protest, to forms of social communication. And if the elements of
the choreographer's craft involve space, rhythm, time and physical communication,
these tools might be put to an open-ended range of creative uses.
Certainly a growing number of artists who would formerly be categorised as
choreographers are working in areas suggested by Hildebrand. Tino Sehgal presented
one of his first public works as part of the Resolution season of new dance at The Place.
But he came to prominence with These Associations, a work about group dynamics for
the Tate's Turbine Hall, in which performers in variously choreographed formations
interacted with the public, telling them stories, asking questions, making provocations,
and subtly re-choreographing the crowd.
12/4/13 Choreography is dead. Long live dance | Stage | theguardian.com
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'No spectators, only
performers' … William Forsythe's White Bouncy Castle. Photograph: Timur Emek/Getty
Images
As far back as 1997, William Forsythe's White Bouncy Castle created a choreographic
space in which "there were no spectators, only performers" – ie the sprawling, bouncing,
jumping members of the public.
The French choreographer Jerome Bel studied Barthes and Foucault as a prelude to
creating works that were witty, surreal subversions of performance and participation.
Siobhan Davies has moved from pure dance to a more eclectic range of visual art
projects, including film, which she still resolutely describes as choreography. Jonathan
Burrows, in partnership with composer Matteo Fargion, delivers "choreographed
lectures" that tread a rigorous, hilarious line between music, erudition, dance and
slapstick, while the latest project by Rosie Kay veers towards dance as a tool for
anthropological study.
All this is lively evidence of an art form pushing its boundaries, and arguing with itself.
And I love the fact that as practitioners debate the question of what they mean by dance
and choreography, I have no idea where or what it will lead to.
At the same time, however, there's a polarised and even puritanical rhetoric to some of
this debate which I can't help reacting to. And not simply because the logical conclusion
of Hildebrand's case for the death of choreography would pretty much make me
redundant too.
Right now, dance has never looked more popular, or – despite the sapping effects of
funding cuts – more creatively diverse. And I'm wary of imposing on that creativity any
theory that is predicated on a politics of schism – from the "No's" of Rainer's manifesto,
to the apocalyptic imagery of Hildebrand's argument, to the bluntly named Non Danse
movement that has been thriving in France. If I'm able to relish the brilliant intellectual
legerdemain of Burrows and Fargion, or the meticulous poetics of Davies' film-making,
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it's not because I see those talents as a negation of traditional dance-making. I don't see
those choreographers as occupying a conceptually superior high ground, denied to those
like Mark Morris, Crystal Pite, Wayne McGregor and others who create form, meaning
and beauty out of pure dance steps.
From where I stand as a critic, choreography doesn't look anywhere near dead or dying
– it's just playing on a much wider spectrum.
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