Project Details
Projekt
Awareness: Techniques of Making-Present and Subjective Re-Appropriation of Time in Contemporary Dance
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Gabriele Brandstetter
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Term
from 2016 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 319305163
The project will examine the epistemic dimension of body practices based on awareness, and their relations to the aesthetics, organizational forms, and performance formats of contemporary dance. By inquiring into the interpenetration between artistic, therapeutic, sociopolitical and economic practices since the 1960s, it seeks to investigate which images of the body are being produced in forms of practicing whose epistemology relies on evidence generated through realization as making-present. The investigation departs from the discrepancy between the body as modeled by science and the body as experienced by the subjects, a split that belongs to the quandaries of modern life. Bodywork based on awareness responds to this quandary with a re-subjectivation of body time, which aims at returning the power over time to the modern subject, allowing for a reappropriation of finite, fugitive life through an enhancement and a differentiation of attention. Defined as a mode of making-present, which simultaneously channels and is being channeled, awareness becomes an instrument for the reappropriation of body time. In the field of contemporary dance, this happens especially in the globally successful workshop format. In workshop practice, subjective proper time is not constituted in terms of a primary self-relation, to be attributed to the subject; rather, the subjective property of time is being produced from a managed physical presence in a practice room. The project therefore analyzes dance performances that have been developed from body practice workshops. The analyses will address the ideological aspects of a re-subjectivation of time, but also its aesthetic, social and political potential. The project thus aims to contribute to clarifying the »proper« in »proper times«. Following an assessment of the workshop format, its specific spatio-temporality of an individual-collective making-present, and its significance for the body episteme of contemporary dance, the project will examine in detail three productions, in whose case workshops did not only serve for training and preparation but substantially helped to generate the aesthetic of the performances: Deborah Hay`s choreography »No Time to Fly«, developed 2010 in a large-sized workshop lasting several months; the workshop series »E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S«, which was initiated by Xavier Le Roy and, after being continued for several years, led to the public performance format »Project« in 2003; and »Visible Undercurrent«, a performance event directed by Peter Pleyer, developed in collaboration with the choreographers Meg Stuart, Sasha Waltz, Jeremy Wade, Yoshiko Chuma, Mark Tompkins, and Eva Karczag and a group of young dancers, which centered around a workshop-cum-audience that took place on three consecutive evenings in 2004.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
