Through a casual meeting on May 1st inside a kitchen located in xberg Berlin, 5 dancers decided to get "organized". The result being a look into the potential of performing simply a dance phrase, constructed and performed by its contributors. The phrase being our unanimous form of expression. Like a phrase in speech the dance is left incomplete, unmanaged by the rules of composition and form. Through its live performance the phrase becomes a gesture towards an understanding of a greater meaning.
We recognize some of the many social implications of performing a group dance but chose not to stress them as they are not the point of departure.
Why?
We say why not? Can we perform a group dance today without the burdening historical context that has made us all skeptical of actually coming together? Can we empower the dance while performing ourselves without seeming hegemonic? Can this dance leave space for each individual without leaving traces of individual egos?
Performing a dance phrase which has become somewhat taboo in the recent contemporary dance practice enables us to reconfigure the way we look at group dance, group choreography, and dancing in general. We embrace this taboo not merely to revisit it, but instead to initiate once again a communal engagement that acknowledges all its parts and individual investments while subordinating ourselves to the larger structure being the phrase we produce.
Conditions for Phrase 3.0:
1) find a space, record a phrase
2) upload it to vimeo.com
3) add it to this channel
4) once we have enough we'll perform them
Phrase 3.0 writing the khoreia
ReplyDelete"The chorus also represents, on stage, the general population of the particular story, in sharp contrast with many of the themes of the ancient Greek plays which tended to be about individual heroes, gods, and goddesses."
Phrase is a reactivation of the etymological roots of choreography, the writing of the movement of the chorus. It is a formulation of a contemporary chorus that undertakes a collective utterance, a synchronised gesture, a shared phrase of a khoreia. In Ancient Greek Tragedy the chorus represented the movement of a community and indeed phrase 3.0 mobilises this heritage.
It is a project that emerges through a heterarchal collaboration of an artistic community bound by friendship, artistic affinity, life in Berlin.
It comes from a recognition of current economic and production circumstances and the impact that these have on determining the shape of artistic work, living and community. It recognises the process and performance as a moment of an artistic and social gathering. Under current free-lance, ultra-mobile circumstances the project is a space for meeting, of the possibility for togetherness. The premise is therefore granting the possibility for this community to meet and the staged event is an emergent celebratory moment of a community.
In being a collective endeavour of synchronised movement it does not aspire to homogeneity. It is a recognition of plurality of speech. The phrase is an articulation that arrises from differentiating contributions. Indeed it is counter-movement to the author-centred production circumstances. Thus it is a displacement of the individual protagonist of the artistic scene for a group protagonist. It will emerge through a process of writing in which each individual contributes to the emergent phrase. It is like the game in which a sentence is written on a piece of paper, folded and passed on to the next person who continues the story without seeing the previous line, in this game none of the individuals is in control of the emergent phrase, nevertheless each takes responsibility for it.
Comments:
-i think it is important for us to decide for some formal strictness, like: every persons contribution should have a specific duration e.g. 1 and a half minutes
-if you are convinced by this notion of contemporary chorus, we can use some spatial co-ordinates and number of of people (in ancient greek drama usually 12 or 15) to use as determinant for composing phrase…
let me know
big hug and kiss
the video is not so good but i like the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49esza4eiK4