Rhythm as an artistic and theoretical tool in contemporary choreography

Dance has always had an intimate relation with time. The art form does not only unfold in time, but it also folds the time in which it unfolds itself. The creation of a dance piece always entails the organization of time, the development of a time proper to the piece. Every choreography needs to transform the consecutive gestures into a temporal unity that is shared by the audience and the performers. Since the second half of the twentieth century, however, the temporal quality of dance has been side-lined for two reasons. First of all, the labelling of dance as ‘conceptual’ has led to a reading in which dance is reduced to an a-temporal structure or concept. Second, dance and performance theory’s alignment with ephemerality has resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘real time’ of dance, its taking place in the here-and-now, at the expense of its ‘lived time’, the fact that dance produces a temporality that is complex and multiple. In Unbecoming rhythms: performing temporality in contemporary dance, we aim to redress the balance by stressing the temporal, durational qualities of choreography. To analyse how temporality unfolds in choreography we use rhythm as a framing concept. The reason for this usage is two-fold. In the first instance, rhythm will allow us to come to a better understanding of the specific temporality that emerges in the concrete performances. As rhythm is the primary tool for both the construction and experience of the time of the performance, studying it will enable us to understand how time is operated in and through a singular performance. In the second instance, the focus on rhythm will enable us to explore the relation between the temporal regime that is established by modern dance and the temporality that is produced by the choreographic practices that emerged in the nineties. Modernist dance has developed its practice around a specific conceptualization of rhythm. Consequently, the proposition of a different approach to rhythm also includes the dismantling of the modernist project of dance.

Building on the choreographic work Burrows & Fargion, Edvardsen, and Müller and on the philosophical oeuvre of Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, Unbecoming Rhythms explores how rhythm unfolds itself in the choreographic experiments and show how these rhythms install a temporal regime that is at odds with the traditional, modernist understanding of dance as flow.