THE BODY ARCHIVE SERIESThe body as ICH site
dance | her | his | story Watching Someone Dancing Body Journal This is a series of variations upon two main topics: the notion of the (moving) body as an archive, and the preservation of dance as an embodied experience. I am intrigued by how experiences, thoughts and emotions are stored in the body and how they are displayed – consciously or unconsciously. Our bodily behaviours emit all the corporeal experiences that we lived through. My premise is that each person stores and re-organises body memories (e.g. injury, running/escaping from something, kissing) as an evolving archive. Our everyday body techniques reveal the culturally codified essence of one’s body, which means that the way we organise our movements is a composite of what this body has learnt or experienced over time. Imagine to see a pure dance choreography: organized bodily shapes in relation to space and time. What if we unfold the history of the bodies that took part in it? Can we amend our understanding of a dance piece by becoming more informed about the bodies? Do dances stay alive or do we need to keep them alive? How: searching for the “authentic” or reinventing the “past”? Can our dances and diversities be brought to a dialogue in order to make emerge something new, something shared? What would it be the hybrid emerging from this process of intertwining, combining, merging? Does the production of hybrids enhance or threat cultural diversity? These questions echo the issues of transmission/conservation/innovation/creation. |
Performances:
April, 2015 - PoH, University of Roehampton, London May, 2015 - LAPsody, University of the Arts, Helsinki November, 2015 - The Ohio State University, Columbus November, 2016 - Bakelit M.A.C., Budapest December, 2016 - Oxford Brookes University |