Monday 27 February 2012

‘Tout fait’: Bergson, time, and choreographic being-made

‘Tout fait’: Bergson, time, and choreographic being-made
A mixed mode presentation, incorporating performative elements, will explore the relationship between Bergsonian thought and the readymade – or tout fait – with a focus on the impact of technology on contemporary perceptions of time. The implications of such impacts for collaborative choreographic practices will be considered.

Presented at the College of Arts Association Centenary Annual Conference
24 February 2012, Los Angeles, USA

Representing the Human Paper Abstract


Bodies in Motion: working through plurality
This collaborative paper aims to address questions regarding the notion of plurality as experienced in the performer body. Through practice and writing we attempt to account for such a body, and address wider questions regarding the body and identity in performance.
As professional performance-makers working independently through practice-as-research (in a doctoral context at Middlesex University) we have undertaken an on-going collaboration based on our mutual concern for the process of embodying our research. This article aims to frame certain tendencies, which occur when working with others in the studio. The set of conditions for this on-going project has provided a good terrain to break down some of the mechanisms of performance making, and therefore allowed us to illuminate some aspects of contemporary performance making.
Drawing on philosophical approach to performance making including William James‘ Radical Empiricism, we discuss in detail our shared practice, and attempt to find strategies that will allow us to examine the shifting tension between our sense of the monadic ‘I’ and the idea of the distributed self that Brian Rotman describes in Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (2008). 

Saturday 11 February 2012

Rhizome- ''We have grass in our head''


The term rhizome is introduced by Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari 
to descr ibe the way we are thinking. In biology a rhizome is a n 
under ground system of br anches that form roots and leaf y shoot, just 
beneath and just above the ground. The rhizome is dif ferent from the 
old metaphor of the ‘tree of knowledge’, with its unique original r o ot 
and branches that bif urcate in binary splittings. Rhizomatic th ink ing
allows for the combination of heterogeneous elements that form a 
network that you can enter at any point. Like grass, it grows in b e - 
tween things. Although many people think in arborescent (and hie r - 
archical) structures, Deleuze states that we have grass in our heads. See 
A Thousand P lateaus (1992: 3-25). 

Quoted from  
Patricia Pisters 


Thursday 2 February 2012

Siobhan Davies Studios Feb 28th 2012


Rhythmic Trialogue
Noyale Colin, Florence Peake & JJ Wheeler
At the edge of perception, rhythm marks time. It cuts, flows or disrupts – and creates relationship. Using improvisational structures, two dance artists and a musician create a web of relations with each other, with spectators and with time and space.