Kaleidoskope des Tanzes (Tanz&Archiv: ForschungsReisen 7), 2017

Dance Research Journal, 2014

Over the past five years, we have been witnessing an ever-growing presence of dance performances and choreographic works "exhibited" in major museums across the globe. A quick survey would have to include the exhibition MOVE: Choreographing You, at the Hayward Gallery, London (2010; Dusseldorf 2011; Seoul 2012); the exhibition Danser sa Vie, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011); the exhibition Dance/Draw (2011) at the ICA Boston; and the exhibition Dancing Around the Bride, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013). All of these exhibitions, despite their curatorial singularities and divergent approaches, have explored the deep relations and concurrent developments (to use the expression of Yvonne Rainer 1) between dance and the visual arts since World War II (the big exception being Danser sa Vie, which covered the entire twentieth century). However, other approaches indicate that the current interest in dance and its relationships with the development of the visual arts and of performance art are not just a matter of rewriting history and finding parallel lines of development among the arts. Were we to follow that logic, we could see dance's intrusion into visual culture as parallel to the earlier acceptance of photography, film, and video as arts within the narrow confines of the fine art canon.

Dance Research Journal, 2015

In this paper, I seek to draw out underlying assumptions and emerging paradigms regarding the dance-gallery interface rather than argue for one model over another. What I will indicate in this article are some problems with an over-expanded concept of “the choreographic,” and how we can re-center knowledges and processes particular to “dancing” and “choreography” to reinstate dance as a leader in, and generator of, the micro- and macro-ecologies that shaped creative practice in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Visual arts curation is one field of research that has written the contributions of dance back into this artistic milieu since 2008. Internationally renowned curator and theorist Corinne Diserens has recently described a “désir désespéré du musée pour la danse,” and this has resulted in a broad range of approaches to presenting dance within the gallery context. An examination of a set of dance-based exhibitions in gallery spaces and their ephemera uncover key themes such as a critique of occular-centric regimes, curation as choreography, dance as object and the body-archive.

In recent years, Art History studies have expanded their narrations by incorporating new approaches that prove that esoteric movements and modern “new spiritualities'' were relevant in artistic creation. Thus, the parallels between the hermeticism of esoteric movements and the avant-gardes have been highlighted. The links between artists and esoteric circles or currents have come to light, and there’s been increasing importance in the role that these beliefs, knowledge and practices had in the artistic conception of some creators. The International Seminar Dance, Esotericism, and Avant-gardes will offer a space to reflect from critical perspectives on different matters. How is dance placed in the avant-garde? Could the role of dance be promoted in this context in relation to the esoteric movements? What consequences would this dimension have in the consideration of women’s roles in the artistic and cultural environment? To what degree could dance, esotericism and avant-gardes manifest as spaces of syncretic and dynamic exchange? Are the esoteric circuits spaces to manifest the shadows in the hegemonic discourses? Would a study about the occult serve to unveil more inclusive historiography? ORGANIZATION. Museo Picasso Málaga. R&D Project SÍLFIDE (CSIC. PGC2018-093710-A-I00). R&D Project TRAMA (UCM. HAR2017-82394-R). SCIENTIFIC DIRECTION. Irene López Arnaiz. IH-CSIC. Raquel López Fernández. IH-CSIC. Alicia Navarro. Independent Researcher COORDINATION. Irene López Arnaiz. IH-CSIC. Paloma Rayón Alonso. Museo Picasso Málaga. Mª José Valverde. Museo Picasso Málaga.

A "Musée de la danse/Dancing museum," announced by Boris Charmatz in 2009 as the new identity of the Rennes National Choreography Center he was about to direct, sent a signal both to the institutional world and to dance culture. A museum by artists: this is how one might sum up this movement in favor of a program of artistic transmission that also calls itself a conceptual project, that is able to understand dance within "a historical space." What the choreographer expresses is a desire for an end to cultural compartmentalization as regards both practice and references, a spirit of experimentation, and a fierce resistance to frameworks of preconceived institutional ideas. The vigorous statements of Charmatz's "Manifesto for a Dancing Museum," which are often quoted, evoke various commonplaces so as to demolish them. "We are at a time in history where a museum in no way excludes precarious movements, nor nomadic, ephemeral, instantaneous ones. We are at a time in history where a museum can modify BOTH preconceived ideas about museums AND one's ideas about dance" (Charmatz 2009, 3). Indeed, to suggest that dance in the present day should erupt into a silent, static museum would be mere rhetoric. If galleries of modern and contemporary art have for the last decade done much for the inclusion of dance in major exhibitions and are even starting to think of it in terms of collection, this opening up, above all, brings about a different paradigm of movement. With the notions of "time-based media" and "time-based arts," in recent years there has been an appreciable overhauling of museum culture. The increasing space given in the last two decades to film, video, and sound, whether as works or as documents, has brought with it an unprecedented modification of the temporal experience in museum space. In this regard, the historian Giuliana Bruno (2007) has maintained that the spread of screens in museum spaces shows the relationship this has had from the very beginning with the temporal organization of film narrative: a sequence which, whether fluid or uneven in nature, shapes perceptual duration by the particular mental and physical use of the space that the spectator passes through. As was recently demonstrated to the extreme by the artist Philippe Parreno, who fine-tuned the authority of the time taken to project a film over the time spent by the visitor to the exhibition, 1

Dance Research, 1999

Performance philosophy, 2015

This text could begin with an emphatic assertion: there has not yet been a philosophy of dance that compares to the theories brought forth by music, theatre, poetry or visual art throughout the Western history of philosophy and aesthetics since Plato. Several accounts of a vexed relationship between Western theatre-dance and philosophy repeat the same refrain: that (Western) philosophy 'neglects dance' (Sparshott 1983) and has had very little to say about dancing (Levin 1983). Although baroque ballet has developed equally through both dancing practice and the discourse of the eighteenth century genre of the treatise (Cahusac [1754] 2004, Noverre [1760] 2004), dance as such has been excluded from hierarchical classifications of the beaux arts, most notably from Diderot's and D'Alembert's Enyclopédie (1751-1782). Moreover, François Pouillaude has recently argued that the birth of modern aesthetics means, for dance, the installment of its literal, 'inaugural absence' (Pouillaude 2009, 15) from philosophical interest. While Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) makes only two brief remarks in passing about dance, perhaps because the combination of 'the play of sensations in music with the play of figures in the dance' (§ 52) shows a confusion of temporal and spatial (plastic) categories, Hegel's Aesthetics ([1835/1842] 1975) and Schelling's Philosophy of Art ([1802-03] 1989) make no mention of it. With the exception of the poetic privilege that Nietzsche confers upon it in Zarathustra's dancing songs (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1891] 1974)-a conspicuous case of metaphorical abduction which, as we will discuss later, carries on into contemporary philosophy-we will have to wait until the second half of the twentieth century for dance to make its theoretical debut in a small number of serious attempts to investigate it philosophically (e.g., Langer 1953; Sheets-Johnstone 1966). Her latest works include the exhibition Danse Guerre at CCN Rennes (2013) and Spatial Confessions at Tate Modern (2014).

Dance Research, 2010

Many contemporary dancers are tired of the conventional theater space with its divided stage-audience structure. They seem eager to enter a shared space where audience and the objects on view coexist. In a performance, the objects, usually permanent and material, become time-based and immaterial--to the great interest of the museums.