Lune : dancing as land surveying

Stewart, Nigel (2009) Lune : dancing as land surveying. In: Practice-as-research in performance and screen :. Palgrave, Basingstoke. ISBN 9780230220010

Abstract

Consisting of both a DVD and a catalogue entry, this contribution to the book Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen demonstrates three systems of mapping environment that, in very different ways, bring to consciousness ‘spatiotemporal “shapes”’ embedded within our experience of the ‘intuitively given surrounding world’ (Husserl 1970: 25, 27). These very different systems are linked by the concept of ‘chains’:  Chain surveying – the use of steel chains to measure imaginary triangles between key features of a terrain (Garner et al. 1976, c. 2).  Choreutics – the analysis of the body’s choreutic chains, or spatiotemporal trace-forms (Laban 1966).  Bartenieff Fundamentals – the exploration of anatomical ‘kinetic chains’ which support the body’s mutating shapes (Hackney 2002: 47). The video excerpt on the DVD identifies links between the point early on in the creative process when the collaborators were sourcing material in situ, and the point at which the piece was premiered at Dance Cuts II at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, on 13 November 2005. The catalogue entry explains the method of work in between those two points, viz., a method of ‘surveying’ the marsh land that utilized aspects of the three aforementioned systems and generated the finished work. This method involved a three-stage process: preparation, reconnaissance, and stations.