Stamatia Portanova: Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts (2013)

“Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In Moving without a Body, Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software’s capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become.

Discussing the development of different audiovisual tools and the shift from analog to digital, she focuses on some choreographic realizations of this evolution, including works by Loie Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Throughout, Portanova considers these technologies and dances as ways to think—rather than just perform or perceive—movement. She distinguishes the choreographic thought from the performance: a body performs a movement, and a mind thinks or choreographs a dance. Similarly, she sees the move from analog to digital as a shift in conception rather than simply in technical realization. Analyzing choreographic technologies for their capacity to redesign the way movement is thought, Moving without a Body offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262018926, 9780262018920
200 pages

Reviews: Donnarumma (Mute, 2014), Murphy (Afterimage, 2014), Thain (Digicult).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (11 MB)

Vera Maletic: Body–Space–Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts (1987)

“In May 1926, when the choreographer Rudolf von Laban came to America on an ethnographic mission to record Native American dances, a reporter accosted him before he had even stepped ashore. As Laban recounts in his autobiography, the journalist performed a wild tap dance on deck, proffered his starched cuff to the European dance artist, and said, ‘Can you write that down?’ Laban—who had pioneered a new grammar of movement called Kinetography, or script-dance—scribbled a few dance notation signs on the man’s sleeve. The hyperbolic headline announcing Laban’s arrival read: ‘A New Way to Success. Mr. L. Teaches How to Write Down Dances. You Can Earn Millions With This.’ One entrepreneur, tempted by that prospect, tracked Laban down at his hotel and offered him a fabulous amount of money to teach the Charleston and other dances by correspondence course. Laban spurned the get-rich-quick scheme: he did not want to be a part of what he dismissed as ‘robot-culture.’ 


To the untrained eye, Kinetography looks esoteric and occult, but to the few who can read it the complex strips of hieroglyphs allow them to recreate dances much as their original choreographers imagined them. Dance notation was invented in seventeenth-century France to score court dances and classical ballet, but it recorded only formal footsteps and by Laban’s time it was largely forgotten. Laban’s dream was to create a ‘universally applicable’ notation that could capture the frenzy and nuance of modern dance, and he developed a system of 1,421 abstract symbols to record the dancer’s every movement in space, as well as the energy level and timing with which they were made. He hoped that his code would elevate dance to its rightful place in the hierarchy of arts, ‘alongside literature and music,’ and that one day everyone would be able to read it fluently.” (from Christopher Turner’s essay in Cabinet magazine, 2009/10)

The intent of this present study is to offer an examination of the origins and development of Laban’s key concepts.

Publisher Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York/Amsterdam, 1987
Volume 75 of Approaches to Semiotics
ISBN 3110107805, 9783110107807
265 pages
via joandleefe

Review (Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Dance Research, 1988)

PDF (40 MB)

See also works on Laban on Monoskop wiki.

Sally Banes: Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (1980/87)

“Sally Banes writes criticism with a dancer’s feel for dancing, a personal acquaintance with the choreographers she writes about, a solid knowledge of critical theory, and an awareness of the many relationships of post-modernism to the contemporary cultural context. Terpsichore in Sneakers is a first-rate contribution to our post-modern dance.

Banes restricts her discussion to ten choreographers: six members of Robert Dunn’s 1960-62 composition workshop (Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Deborah Hay, Simone Forti), all but the last of whom were early members of the Judson Dance Theater, three second-generation Judson choreographers (Meredith Monk, Kenneth King, Lucinda Childs), and Doug Dunn, who performed with Rainer, Paxton, Brown, and Gordon in the Grand Union.” (from the review by Milton H. Snoeyenbos, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1980)

Originally published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1980
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1987
With a new Introduction
ISBN 0819561606
311 pages

Commentary (André Lepecki, Dance Theatre Journal, 1999)

Publisher

EPUB
See also films and videos in UbuWeb’s dance section