Avalanche: A case study in creative action as research
World Dance Alliance, Angers, France, July 2014
Co-authored with Rachel Boggia, Assistant Professor of Dance, Bates College
Following paradigms put forth by performance theorists Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut (2009) and sociologist Hans Joas (1996), using concrete examples from our work in Avalanche, a collaborative creative research project, this paper responds to Butterworth and Wildschut’s proposal: “In what ways is it possible to perceive choreographic processes and products as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’, ‘being’, and ‘interpreting’?”(5). Joas proposes three models for understanding human creativity, classifying expression as subjective, rooted in the actor’s experience; production as objective and material; and revolution as the potential of a product to affect the social order (71). Avalanche, which premiered at the 2012 SDHS conference, addresses each of Joas’ models. Proposed, curated, and enacted by an intergenerational and interdisciplinary cast of artist-educators, this project concerned both pedagogy and performance. But several dialectics emerged that sculpted the research process as one that centered on instability--in the context of shifting hierarchies based on artistic and academic relationships and in the interaction of proficiency and uncertainty. The research team found itself drawing upon embodied skill sets from the theater and dance cannons; simultaneously engaging traditional and emergent compositional methodologies; performing hyperpersonal subject matter in a sometimes cool performance mode; diving in and out of the personal in the process with occasionally unwilling intimacy; weaving together improvisation and set material in performance; and linking narrative and abstract representational strategies. Avalanche both reflects and articulates current trends and provides a tangible opportunity to examine contemporary performance as research.
Co-authored with Rachel Boggia, Assistant Professor of Dance, Bates College
Following paradigms put forth by performance theorists Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut (2009) and sociologist Hans Joas (1996), using concrete examples from our work in Avalanche, a collaborative creative research project, this paper responds to Butterworth and Wildschut’s proposal: “In what ways is it possible to perceive choreographic processes and products as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’, ‘being’, and ‘interpreting’?”(5). Joas proposes three models for understanding human creativity, classifying expression as subjective, rooted in the actor’s experience; production as objective and material; and revolution as the potential of a product to affect the social order (71). Avalanche, which premiered at the 2012 SDHS conference, addresses each of Joas’ models. Proposed, curated, and enacted by an intergenerational and interdisciplinary cast of artist-educators, this project concerned both pedagogy and performance. But several dialectics emerged that sculpted the research process as one that centered on instability--in the context of shifting hierarchies based on artistic and academic relationships and in the interaction of proficiency and uncertainty. The research team found itself drawing upon embodied skill sets from the theater and dance cannons; simultaneously engaging traditional and emergent compositional methodologies; performing hyperpersonal subject matter in a sometimes cool performance mode; diving in and out of the personal in the process with occasionally unwilling intimacy; weaving together improvisation and set material in performance; and linking narrative and abstract representational strategies. Avalanche both reflects and articulates current trends and provides a tangible opportunity to examine contemporary performance as research.