Anne Grete Eriksen
Choreographer and professor Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo
Action towards Articulation
As a choreographer I involve in functional and emotional energy patterrns. Form, rhythm, texture, dynamics, use of time and space emerge from the body as I move.
A new piece of choreography for the stage is movement designed in multi- dimensional layers with dancers, music, set – design, light, color, and other medias or technical devices. The Concept may be verbalized. The Content is movement in time and space.
The questions
What constitutes optimal conditions in the processes between dancer / performer and choreographer / creator?
How can dance artists verbally share their reflections of kinesthetic experience, perception, craft, and method? What are the qualities inherent in a groundbreaking artistic process?
The project
In “Action towards Articulation” I have interviewed prominent Norwegian dancers and choreographers on the essential criteria of groundbreaking experience in their artistic processes. I wanted to learn more about the inherent characteristics in the process of creating a new piece, and how to explain the development of methods.
What are the inherent characteristics of creative dance processes between the dancer and the choreographer? If there is a specific dialogue between performer and creator on a sophisticated level, what are the elements in this dialogue?
One central part is the physical memory.
Physical memory
From a musicians point of view a dancer’s physical – or muscle- memory is amazingly precise. She can remember complex movement – combinations without notation and reproduce them many years later. Her sense of space and accuracy in remembering spacial positions is impressive to the architect. Her ability to observe detailed visual and audible information on multiple tracks equals the filmmaker’s.
The Tacit Knowledge of the choreographer equals a composer who conducts his own music: they both efficiently express the tacit knowledge through rhythmic punctuation, utilizing facial expressions, gesticulations and the use of dynamic variations of voice, rather than complete meaningful sentences.
Communication in the moment of creating
The dancer, taking an active part in the creation of a new piece, triggers her perception and her body memory, kinesthetic sensing and physical ”know-how”. This bodily experience is often referred to as ”craft”. How ”craft” forms a ”text”, and how then ”the text of the dance” emerges from the body of the choreographer and dancer becomes choreographic ”Signs orchestrated in Time and Space”.
Language in the rehearsal studio
In the course of the working process a language is created between performer and choreographer with codes that can be difficult to decipher for an outsider. Words are given their own specific meaning, often blended with technical dance-terminology (in French or English), demonstrations of positions, space patterns, or energy flow, nonverbal communication, touch and gesture. This language points in diverse directions of which one attempts to clarify the technicality of weight, flow, the timing and spacing of specific sections of movement. The other attempts to elicit the inner landscape of the dance, its emotionality, its meaning and its significance.
Research approach
The interviews which form the basis of the research were videotaped and edited.
I have reflected on a series of themes by listening to dancers and choreographers talking about the same process but experienced from individual angles. These are for instance; How does the dancer understand herself and the nature of her artistic contribution?
What does she say about the optimal conditions for communication in the studio?
And what does the choreographer express about her own aesthetic concerns?
The four dancers involved in the project are Ellen Kjellberg, Ingrid Lorentzen, Cecilie Lindeman Steen and Sigrid Edvardsson. The four choreographers are Edith Roger, Kjersti Alveberg, Ina Christel Johannessen and Ingun Bjørnsgaard. They are eight strong female voices in the history of modern Norwegian dance from the late sixties to the present.
Documentation
The result of the research is presented in the format of a CD ROM with live images, written texts and a selection of rare video – excerpts. The material is composed similar to my own choreographic processes, in which Chance Procedures, a composition method inherited from the American master choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, have been an important source of inspiration.
The objective of the documentation
I wish to invite students, artists, designers, scientists, and theoreticians to navigate through the material in order to reflect on the complexity of the moving body in artistic practices and expand the reflection on physical memory. I would also like to demonstrate how mechanisms in practice coheres with manners of communication, and how these mechanisms and manners may give clarity to content and artistic intention. Finally I hope to bring the voices and energy of the performing and creative artists into the field of research.
Anne Grete Eriksen
