(dis)integration

(dis)integration is part of a project in motion that explores the accretionary interplay between turbulence, precarity, the unsteady state condition and the choreodramaturg.

A CUT (choreodramaturg-unsteady state-turbulence) project.
The CUT collective are a group of professional artists working in film, fashion, performance and music.

The (film) projects are organised at the last minute based upon the availability of the artists. The work is instant and involves minimal preparation as a deliberate attempt to invoke/explore turbulence, precarity and chaos as a disciplined and rigorous method/state of working: to create what I call the ‘unsteady state condition’.

Choreodramaturg

‘The choreodramaturg proposes a useful package – a split personality – that relates the micro level of movement to the macro level of the world: a politicised dramaturg who develops work, bringing the outside world into the space while questioning how the institution moves and defines movement’ (Sadot, 2019: 28).

The search for my identity within my creative process working with dance theatre artists led me to explore a hybrid role that I posit is best captured by the term ‘choreodramaturg’, an original term I have developed to delineate this composite role. Notably, I do not choreograph in the traditional sense, where routines and steps are passed on by the choreographer to be drilled and synchronised by dancers. I do not function as a dramaturg in the traditional sense of forming a dialogical relationship with a choreographer or director to comment on the evolving work and the dance(ers) or act(ors). Rather, I draw on an embodied understanding of movement that aligns itself most closely with dramaturgical thinking when creating movement/choreography. This role manifests itself in a processual approach to creating work, where task-based methods are introduced to test, disrupt and develop new ways of moving with the performers. This involves a process of layering that calls on an interaction and disruption between various elements such as text, movement, subject material and scenography. This interaction and disruption questions the choreographic and visual identity of form and per(form)ance.

While acknowledging Joana Lopes’ original coining of the word choreodramaturgy in 1995, I have chosen simply to fuse the words choreographer and dramaturg to describe a hybrid role as it emerged in my research practice. Calling on my embodied knowledge as a movement-based ensemble theatre practitioner I collaborated with the dance theatre artists in my research to create new choreographic outcomes. Therefore, I apply the noun choreodramaturg to signify my role as the navigator of the labyrinthine pathways of the collaborative choreographic process. By removing the construction of the specialist choreographer or choreographer as ‘expert’ (Butterworth, 2009), I am challenging traditional conceptions of the dramaturg as a secondary figure: one who does not make direct decisions or statements, but instead supports the primary figure of the choreographer in their work (Trencsényi, 2015). In the context of my research, however, the dramaturg becomes the primary figure, working directly with the performers in a devised process, creating movement by exploring political themes and employing dramaturgical task-based methods. This approach foregrounds dramaturgical processes while questioning the explicit politics of the institutional space.

‘Turbulence is associated with open systems, with networks; it is not simply a complex and unpredictable cultural or physical environment. It is the phenomenon of feedback: or, more exactly, it is the self-conscious awareness of the power of feedback mechanisms to inaugurate new behaviours (…) Turbulence is a challenge to representation’ (Carter, 2014: 1).

Turbulence
In my research projects I deliberately seek out a rigorous strategy to displace and hinder performance-making habits and rituals, captured through the notion of ‘turbulence’. Challenging established paradigms of making work requires processual disruption and the concept of turbulence enables me to problematise accepted modes of working to facilitate change. Additionally, it challenges practitioners’ modus operandi. Theatre practitioner and researcher Eugenio Barba argues that contrary to the image of disorder that it invokes, turbulence is in fact ‘order in motion’ (2000: 61). In the making of the work, this ‘strategy of disorder’ challenges and denies mimesis and clichéd illustration; moreover, it confronts individual and collective tropes that risk becoming nostalgic and burdensome in the research context. Barba came to describe a similar notion, through the term ‘Disorder’. Using an upper case rather than lower case ‘D’, to avoid confusion with the disorder of undisciplined chaos, Barba writes that Disorder is ‘the logic and rigour which provoke, the experience of bewilderment in me and the spectator’ (2010: 17). Drawing from this idea of Disorder as a logical and rigorously invoked process, my practice explores ‘reliable frameworks of turbulence’ in the making of new work. My research employs strategies of turbulence to unpack habitual methods of working and seeks to understand those evolving dynamics, and communicate the impact of such conditions in relation to their potential influence on the outcomes of the work. In the making of the work I use the notion of turbulence as the struggle and messy exchange between materials and bodies, between the co-existing elements of subject material, movement, text, scenography, site, filming, lighting, editing, myself and the collective.

‘To make dance unrecognizable in relation to its expected formations, and therefore make dance truly foreign to itself. Dance's movement of estrangement and derivation,  its critical capacity to escape from forms, times, and procedures it is supposed to be confined to and identified with as an aesthetic discipline…’ (Lepecki, 2016: 6).

The Unsteady State Condition
Through the working processes of multiple entry point layering and processual accretion the choreodramaturg is positioned as a creator–facilitator, an agent of turbulence who instigates the ‘unsteady state condition’ out of which the work emerges. The term ‘unsteady state condition’ is commonly used in the field of thermodynamics to describe the scientific principle of thermodynamic heat transfer in areas such as chemical and thermal engineering, where it is posited that the desirable ‘steady state condition’ cannot exist without the initial unsteady state condition when elements are in flux (White, Gilet and Alexander, 2002). Used as a metaphor, we might then view the steady state condition to signify a choreopoliced product. My research explores the possibility of a choreodramaturg constructing an unsteady state condition, and positioning dance artists as the creators of the movement vocabulary that emerges from such conditions. This processual approach is unsteady in that it is largely improvised and not concerned with choreographic output in the traditional (commercially focussed) sense.

The term ‘accretion’ is often used in geological contexts to define a process of layers building on each other over time. ‘Accretion is the natural process of growth, slow addition of soil material, such as clay, silt, sand, or gravel, to land by deposition through the operation of natural causes. The land is added by the gradual or imperceptible accumulation of such material to a bank or a shore’ (Anand, 2006).

Processual Accretion
The term ‘processual accretion’ evolved from my need to define a processual approach that moves beyond the idea of the studio-based entry point layering method. I describe entry points as a nexus for devising, where individual task-based components such as text, scenography and movement are sequentially introduced to the dancer engaged in a specific devising task. From these multiple entry points a compositional layering process then develops from which detailed and textured performance material emerges. However, reflecting on the studio practice of my previous projects I realised that I was also doing many things simultaneously alongside the entry point layering method wherein layers of conceptual thinking, reflection and analysis came into play, linking the physical practice with broader sociopolitical themes circulating within the broader conceptual metaspace. Therefore, this notion moved my understanding and application of the entry point layering from solely working with a targeted physical method towards a complex accumulative process of entering, re-entering, evaluating and revisiting the accumulative effects of this process on the evolving performance material. In other words, the material I was making in the studio became infused by broader issues, themes and contexts existing outside the studio space, which influenced my thought process and orientation towards the work as it evolved and fed into the devising process. Furthermore, the idea of accretion moved my understanding towards how the evolving material functioned in relation to the evolution of conceptual ideas and my thinking practices.

The geological use of the term ‘accretion’ denotes ‘the imperceptible accumulation’ (Anand, 2006) of material relating to time. I use this definition to refer to the wider process of osmosis between practice and theory that has occurred through my practice research. I use ‘processual accretion’ to house the idea of myself as an artist becoming more porous in a subtle internal shift, which has enabled me to absorb sociocultural and political themes. These themes arise from the iterative cycle of doing and reflecting wherein I apply a wider sociopolitical lens, which impacts on my work by implicating the physical and perceptual movement(s) of dancer(s), spectator(s) and myself. I use ‘processual accretion’ to capture the processual and accumulative nature of what I do, and put the previous physical notion of entry point layering in dialogue with theoretical ideas, enabling a space of dialogue to occur between practice and theory. This enables me to absorb political themes and trends that imbricate my practice, some of which might already be present in dancers’ bodies or the spaces in which we move, and others which manifest around me and through the work itself. I use ‘processual accretion’ to facilitate an openness and awareness to themes, issues, trends and agendas hanging in the air and this enables me as a practitioner to acknowledge certain elements that attract my attention and play to the themes of my inquiry, then I can draw on this awareness through practice research. Thus I capture the evolving and mobile nature of this process.

(dis)integration
Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot
D.O.P: Rob Baker Ashton
Dancer: Kat Collings
Sound design: ICY Audio Visual
Editor: Alice Underwood


References
Anand, R. (2006) Accretion, Oxford Public International Law. Available at: http://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1372#law-9780199231690-e1372-div1-1 (Accessed: 12 December 2018).

Barba, E. (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: burning the house. Edited by J. Barba. London & New York: Routledge.

Barba, E. and Barba, J. (2000). The Deep Order Called Turbulence: The Three Faces of Dramaturgy, TDR/The Drama Review, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 56–66.

Butterworth, J. and Wildschut, L. (eds) (2009) Contemporary Choreography A Critical Reader. Oxon: Routledge.

Carter, P. (2014) ‘Touchez – The Poetics of Turbulence’, Performance Research, 19(5), pp. 1–6.

Lepecki, A. (2016) Singularities: dance in the age of performance. Oxon/New York: Routledge.

Sadot, P. (2019). Unsteady State: hip hop dance artists in the space(s) of UK dance theatre. PhD Thesis. University of Chichester. Available at: https://paulsadotphd.com/chapters/chapter-1/#Key_terminology (Accessed 20 June, 2020).

Trencsényi, K. (2015) Dramaturgy in the Making. London & New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

White, R., Gilet, S. and Alexander, A. (2002). What Is Unsteady State Heat Transfer? Available at: http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~schreiber/uol/exp240/whatisuss.html [accessed 1 November 2015].