Dances on Street Corners, is the title for my new, outdoor solo, dance work. The title presents a metaphor for exploration into how choreography can be used to capture the relationship between prescribed, and un-prescribed images within the context of live out door dance performance.
The dance critiques the relationship between bodies, space, audience participation, and choreographic languages, and responds to the provocation that performing in outdoor places is a transgressive act that ‘can be subversive, and suggest ways of rethinking subjectivity’ (Briginshaw, 2001).
Drawing on a my past choreographic practice for non-theatre spaces, (The Ric, Dic and Vic Show 2009, The Original Pedestrian 2010, and Bicycle Ballet Mass Touring show 2006 - 16)and, a now well-established European tradition of performance making for outside spaces, the piece investigates how choreographic compositional practice can represent an understanding of ’(a)lternative ways of perceiving, responding and existing in the world, in public and with one another’ (Beringa and Ramstad 2009, quoted by Somdahl – Sands 2015).
The performance represents an innovative investigation into how dance composition and performance for non-theatre settings can be used to;
• Disrupt and reconfigure inside/outside, performer/audience binaries by immersing the audience- participants into the theatrical ‘encounter’ (Machon, 2013).
• Generate an aesthetics language that engages with ‘ways of telling place’ (Holdsworth in Machon 2013) that include the view of the body as ‘continuous with place, and belongs(ing) to it’ (Brown. 2015),
• Galvanise Communities of audience–participants by addressing questions of framing, spectatorship (Stewart in Hunter 2015) and virtuosity.