Citybodymemory

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2011

Dance Research Aotearoa, 2016

Creative practices emerge in relationship with ecologies, spaces and sites, where culture meets geography, where the terrain of the city meets the behaviours of its streets. This article translates the way one dancer has made her home in dance. It is structured around a series of narratives and employs practices of experimental writing in an attempt to capture affective moments. The paradigms that interconnect and inform this writing include practice-led research, contemporary dance, inter-disciplinary studio practices, somatic methodology and dance in tertiary education. Relationships between practices of dancing and writing are at the heart of this paper, which explores how affective spaces created by processes and ecologies of dance might be translated to the page. These auto-ethnographic narratives do not claim to speak for any communities of practice or to map relationships between cities and dancers. Instead, they concentrate on a few specific moments out of many, in the hope that these moments may illuminate a sense of how ecologies of dance, place and community interweave, creating all manner of different kinds of dance-homes, bringing sensoriums of proprioception, touch, connection and listening to the worlds of our cities.

2016

Moving Publics develops a set of strategies for analyzing how professional sitebased dances refunction and reframe the public spaces in which they are set. Using a site-specific methodology, I focus on five case studies in Vancouver (Canada) to advance a theory about the reciprocal relationship between ground and movement-a notion of "choreographic topographies" that is sensitive to the socially and politically inscribed grooves that constitute a given dance's local emplacement. I examine an archival dance, an "urban proscenium" dance, a vertical dance, a danced walking tour, and a tactile dance to analyze how different forms of site-based dance hail audiences in their bids for curbside attention. These performances, I argue, contain important information about the relationship between a temporary public and the address (in the dual sense of salutation and location) around which that public coheres. I contend that choreographic explorations of public places bring us together to move, or in stillness to watch, in ways that challenge our atomized movement through city spaces. In doing so, these dance-based practices pose questions of aesthetics, use, access, exclusion, density, and mobility in resolutely physical terms. Framed by kinaesthetic concepts (arriving, gathering, following, turning, lifting, passing, and adjusting), Moving Publics proposes a model of choreographic thinking that takes movement as a critical lens as well as an object of study. Extending outward from my study of the choreographic object, I bring a movement interpreter's attention to the physical arrangements of audiencing bodies in and around the dances I study. I analyze the consequences of coding as theatrical both the publics and the public spaces in which these dances are set, and I examine what dance-a form that regularly relies on directed, delegated, and aesthetic labour in the context of collaborative co-presencecan expose about how we move in and through our cities, with and past one another. The dances I study foreground how the city (a built, legislated, lived, and perpetually unsettled structure) orchestrates a set of quiet choreographies of the everyday even as they reimagine a "relational kinaesthetics" at the threshold of vicariousness.

Environment and Planning A, 2015

Focusing on three dance works and an autoethnographic account of a site-specific performance in Manchester, UK, this paper explores how contemporary site-specific dance can alter the meaning, practice, and feeling of urban spaces. Philippe Saire's Cartographies (2012) reveals the ludic and sensual potentialities of the city, Wayne Sables's Traffic (2004) foregrounds urban rhythms of place, and a piece by the Guerilla Dance Project (2010) highlights overlooked habitual practices in familiar space. To draw out these themes, we discuss a performance devised by Caitlan in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens.

How might an anthropologist use dance to study cities? How about dance ethnography as method? The Liquor Store Theatre project (LST) is a series of choreographed dance performances and ethnographic conversations on the sidewalks and spaces in and around liquor stores on Detroit's east side. LST started in a moment where you feel tears begin to form: a solitarily emotional place of anguish, release, and sometimes joy. A moment of holding on and of letting go, where something indescribable but so incredibly recognizable is speeding to the surface, rushing at you full throttle, and all you can do is let go and let it happen, whatever it may be. It lands on the shale-and dust-coated sidewalks of the city, dancing to bizarre rhythms as it seeks to connect with people. LST sets forth choreography/ethnography as research method. It uses staged dance performances in the spaces of my neighborhood as the point where ethnographic conversations begin. In this way, creativity and improvisation are at the center of ethnographic encounters. Working in an east side neighborhood in Detroit, LST investigates the complexities of blackness in a small, unique zone of an American city in transition.

Dance Research Journal, 2010

Laurence Louppe once advanced the intriguing notion that the dancer is “the veritable avatar of Orpheus: he has no right to turn back on his course, lest he be denied the object of his quest” (Louppe 1994, 32). However, looking across the contemporary dance scene in Europe and the United States, one cannot escape the fact that dancers—contrary to Orpheus, contrary to Louppe's assertion—are increasingly turning back on their and dance history's tracks in order to find the “object of their quest.” Indeed, contemporary dancers and choreographers in the United States and Europe have in recent years been actively engaged in creating re-enactments of sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure, dance works of the twentieth century. Examples abound: we can think of Fabian Barba'sSchwingende Landschaft(2008), an evening-length piece where the Ecuadorian choreographer returns to Mary Wigman's seven solo pieces created in 1929 and performed during Wigman's first U.S. tour in 1...

This research focuses on the everyday life body and raises questions about the body and the city relationship. Our hypothesis considered the body movement as a sensory tool that defines the city rhythm; and is related to the body experience in the space. Body movement in the city is a human activity and a common denominator in human experience, while moving in an urban space we sensory and we interact in the urban space. This research documented the body movement in five urban areas in Toronto (during April to June of 2012); and analyzed how the body experiences the space. The movement analysis was made during a week-day in the period between 11am and 13am.

2018

This research aims at investigating the theoretical basis, the role, and the regularities of performing arts in the urban environment. References to theatre and dance are abundant in urban studies, but they serve almost exclusively as metaphors. Investigating the specificity of performing arts will also allow clarifying the performative aspects of every artistic intervention in urban space. Indeed, from ancient rituals to contemporary street theatre, an intentional and staged action plays a central role not only in the processes of sense giving and community building, or in what is today called "placemaking," but also in the "production of space." Three main conceptual tools are identified: the rhythmanalytical method, as sketched by Lefebvre; the trialectical logic, as elaborated by the Situationist International; and the category of liminality, as defined by Turner. The second section of the work, called "Atlas," while working as a repertoire of case ...

Artelogie, 2022

Recherche sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l'Amérique latine 18 | 2022 Utopie, dystopie et biopolitique dans la crise pandémique et géopolitique

Athens Journal of Architecture, Vol.6, Issue 3, 2020

The historic neighbourhood of Raval, in Barcelona presents a multicultural urban landscape. It contains a sense of both tangible and intangible identities influenced by a high level of social mobility arising from migration, tourism and urban gentrification processes. In April 2018 we led an exploratory workshop with neighbourhood residents, our objective was to observe the multisensorial nature of this urban landscape with locally-based participants. Through an arts-based residency we explored body-site relations by drawing attention to the body, human movement in space and its relation to and reflection of the urban landscape. Our methodology involved a five-day movement workshop with 14 participants in site-based movement experimentation through which we explored urban affects, engagement, familiarity, and senses of belonging to space. We focused our attention on the creation of emotional and sensorial landscapes through our bodies, using site-specific movement explorations in sp...