contemporary_dance

This will be about the conditioning and the conditions for improvisation as performance. I won’t talk about improvisation as a technique to create new movement, or as a technique to free the body from habitual movement patterns, or as a technique in contact improvisation to explore movement by physical contact.

Frakcija: The key concept and the title of your book is “social choreography” and you use it in relation to both dance and the aesthetic of everyday movement. How do you frame that concept and how is it related to choreography as artistic practice? Andrew Hewitt: My methodology of “social choreography” is rooted in an attempt to think the aesthetic as it operates at the very base of social experience.

In order to write about the actual situation of contemporary dance in Serbia, I must begin by conceptualizing and contextualizing the local dance scene through its synchronic relationship with neighboring scenes and other European or Western scenes. As contemporary dance is a new phenomenon in Serbia, there are two problematic theses that I would like to put forward as starting points.

I gave to this talk the title: «the emancipated spectator». As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts, problems and theories which seem at first sight to bear no direct relation on each other.

One of the first comments I could call out after the performance of The Theatre of Repetitions was: finally! Finally an event where music and theatre engage on an autonomous third plane of philosophy, saved from the obsessive search for a suitable Musik+Theater relationship whereby the capacity for representation in music traditionally is weighed against theatrical staging.