Souvenir

Souvenir is a remotely directed, site-situated choreography that was created under the restrictions of the 2020/21 lockdown. The project investigates how site-dance might be employed as method to address pressing question of how we respond to and engage with, the environments in which we live.
A souvenir, is a memento of an ephemeral but significant engagement with a place. It communicates an intensity of feeling about the place and has the intention of connecting people, who are perhaps absent, to them. (2020)

The project was undertaken by twelve dancers living in the UK and Portugal, and was directed via improvisational scores that addressed a specific, somatically informed, relationship to landscape. Each score was audio-recorded and sent to the dancers to follow in an outdoor location of their choosing. Dancers were at liberty to interpret the scores in their own way and were instructed to video-record short segments of their dancing in order to capture their responses. Once each score was completed, the dancers sent the video to the choreographer who edited it into four short site-dance films that form, Souvenir (running time 20 mins).
Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion of correspondences was of particular relevance to the research. The notion of correspondences challenges the traditional view that artistic and creative processes entail the projection of an idea onto materials in order to represent thought. For Ingold, corresponding involves a process of ‘joining with’ the movement of things in order to achieve a mutuality that produces the artefact themselves (2017:12). Corresponding, is a form of thinking through making where in the movement of our imagination joins the dynamics of the materials being used to generate the product (ibid). In Souvenir, the audio-recordings and video initiated correspondences that tuned the dancers' attention to the dynamics of the site in order to establish a reciprocity between people and places. This relied on a process through which the choreographer, although 'absent', was able to direct the production and shape the video material into a souvenir of the dancers' engagements in order to establish and experience a body-site dialogue that reconfigured the norms of space by imbricating an increased sense of agency and belonging there (Hunter 2015). The methods employed to do this, raised critical questions that align with Michel de Certeau’s, assertion that pedestrian acts (such as dancing), transform spaces into places bound to bodies, like, ‘lovers in each other’s arms.’ (1984:93).
The project initiates a wider conversation about the implications of dancing outdoors for individual dancers and questions the ways that dancing outdoors, might positively impact perceptions of self in relation to shared public spaces.