Hi, I’m Susannah!

These are some stills from my

Embedded Dance practice in Mallacoota.

documentaion blurb

first version, livestream performance from November 29, 2020

“No Dancing, No Singing, No Mingling”

two versions creating a bit of a not so nice cannon… the original version at home in Mallacoota and a studio practice in February at UNSW.

Program Notes:

Despite this striking imperative from NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian earlier this year in the context of social distancing, we take the tonic of collaboration, experimentation, music, dance, and technologies of connection. Here amongst restriction and devastation we explore fluidity and buoyancy through play with ornamentation, following interest or fun:

Turn, divide, alternate, undulate, shake

Graces and ghosts

Lean, slur, and fall up or down 

Approached by leap 

Resolved by step

Fluidity creates buoyancy

We take a wide girth on a narrow path

When immersed

Fluid exerts force 

On any body 

Buoyancy always points up

Pressure increasing with depth

music: Padma Newsome

dance: Susannah Keebler

camera: Larry Gray

The performance "No Dancing, No Singing, No Mingling” is presented as a part of Melaka Art and Performance Festival 2020

MAP Fest 2020, proudly supported by:

E-Plus Global

Tony Yap Company

ImPermanence Productions

 

Here, Padma and I perform a very open score version of the last segment of “No Dancing, No Singing, No Mingling”

movement from improvised to “set” material

and back again

I realised that my practice of “setting” dance choreography (as opposed to improvising) is one of documentation.

Kociejew writes about the “significance of documentary practices helping information stabilize and emerge.” He writes that a document must be created. An informational object, like an artwork, and is not necessarily a document on its own, it must be processed. Conversely, a document alone does not transmit information, it needs practices to materialise the data. (Kociejew, p.103)

 

My body is marked by the many dances I have Danced

as well as by many of my life experiences.

In the period following the New Year’s Eve bushfires I had a new experience of my home which surprisingly survived, I felt a paradoxical detachment from my material possessions and at the same time, I felt overwhelmingly grateful to have not lost my home and its contents particularly my dance/performance books which are commonly expensive to replace because they are small press printings or are out of print. I reference and use them often in practice.

Here, further experimenting with simultaneous narration a previous improvised session. (Padma on camera.)

A rainy- or hot-day indoor practice in my tiny lounge room. Here, I am remembering the piece and vocalising aspects of the materials in a pseudo-Bill T. Jones way. this is mapping my engagement geospaciality and other aspects of the score and movement choreography.

During this process, I came across, “Document Phenomenolgy: a framework for holistic analysis” by Tim Gorichanaz, which looks at the subject of how an object becomes a document. The framework seemed easily applicable to a “set” piece of choreography or to a video recording/documentation of an improvised dance. However, I wanted to explore whether it could be applied to a live improvised piece.

For some weeks, I made this the focus of my live performance practices which I did across three weeks at Bastion Point. Some aspects of woking with the framework didn’t really work in that setting for several different reasons described here below.

Here, my colleague, Chelsea, has recorded three layers (abtrinsic, adtrinsic, and intrinsic properties) of the framework while watching the recording of the livestream. We did this together on a Zoom call. I then layered the recordings together with the video excerpt.

Here, I recorded three layers (abtrinsic, adtrinsic, and intrinsic properties) of the framework while watching the recording of the livestream. We did this together on a Zoom call. I then layered the recordings together with the video excerpt.

Here are all the layers played at once.

It is apparent that the phenomenological framework for documental becoming can be applied to improvised dance. However, this is difficult to self-administer, so it is more useful at least for me at this point to continue to seek out ways of involving others, both artists and audience members who are not doing the performance to perform integrated documentation processes.

Here, I try to explicate different “docemes” or aspects of documental information (Gorichnaz, p.1124)

A recorded (longish) conversation about the framework between me, Padma, and retired landscape architect, Cathy Pirrie, who comes in half-way through. I layered the audio over some video on the same day. The first video is before the coversation. The second is after.

WORKS CITED / WORKS READ

Auslander, Philip. Liveness : Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Routledge, 1999.

Bank, Motion, and Motion Bank. “Using the Sky - Motion Bank.” http://scores.motionbank.org/dh/#/set/introduction-to-concepts.

Foster, Susan Leigh. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. First edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Gorichanaz, Tim. “Conceptualizing Self-Documentation.” Tim Gorichanaz, January 1, 2017. http://timgorichanaz.com/writings/Academic/concepselfdoc/.

———. “Self-Portrait, Selfie, Self: Notes on Identity and Documentation in the Digital Age.” Information 10, no. 10 (September 26, 2019): 297. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10100297.

———. “Understanding Self-Documentation.” Drexel, 2018.

Kosciejew, Marc. “A Documentary-Material Approach for Performance.” Proceedings from the Document Academy 5, no. 1 (July 2, 2018). https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/5/1/3.

———. “A Material-Documentary Literacy: Documents, Practices, and the Materialization of Information.” The Minnesota Review 2017, no. 88 (2017): 96–111. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-3787426.

Kozel, Susan. “Process Phenomenologies,” 54–74, Routledge, 2015.

Lehmann, Sophie-Ann. “Cube of Wood:Material Literacy for Art History.” Lecture, Inaugural Lecture presented at University of Groningen, Nederlands, April 12, 2016. https://www.museumderdinge.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/cube_of_wood._material_literacy_for_art.pdf.

Morgan, Barabara. Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941.

Parker, Sandra. “The Dancer as Documenter: An Emergent Dancer-Led Approach to Choreographic Documentation.” Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 11 (July 1, 2019): 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.11.1.67_1.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. 1st edition. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993.

Reason, Matthew. Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598560.

Walton, Jude. “By Hand and Eye: Dance in the Space of the Artist’s Book.” School of Communication and the Arts, Faculty of Arts, Education, and Human Development, Victoria University, 2010.