The IGNORANT CHOREOGRAPHER – about group dances i dream about and DANCE EMANCIPATION

Recently, a friend told me about amusician who writes each instrument separately, as in not in relation to the voices of the other instruments. The person does not know or care about
controlling what it will sound like when put together, in relation. Instead of predicting, this person goes with one thing at a time and lets the piece appear as a whole. Since it is one and the same person writing all the instruments, they are most likely written out of similar criteria, habits or intentions. It is a little bit like a group dance, but in a group dance, each contribution, each voice is written by a different author. Imagine an instruction, criteria for production of movements making up a dance. Imagine many dances taking place in the same space, making up a bigger dance, that belongs to nobody, which’s authorship is dissolved since there is no one to evaluate, no one who knows what this dance is supposed to be like. The dance is not a means to express a story, is not a tool for self-expression. The dance is that dance, and it is its own end, not a means to any other end. By allowing imitation but also initiation our understanding of dance is as it is being made public being transformed. There is competences, skills, abilities to practice, to improve to make the dance more articulate, diverse and rich in nuance but the dance as such, as a thing, is exactly what it is.

This group dance is not exaxtly do whatever you want, but a handing over of the instructions, of the criteria, of the parameters of one specific dance, of the principles for organization and production of movement that creates this dance. Consider this as way of creating freedom from the dictatorship of taste and intuition. At least from the taste and intuition of the master choreographer in charge, or the controller, the evaluator. Consider intuition as the fastest assimilation of everything you already know, everything you already learnt. If there is any truth to that, which doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, it is strange to consider how artistic intuition would be better than reasoning, logic or a whole team of artists working through the same organizing principles. By sharing the criteria, each participant, each dancer, each co-author evaluate hirs own contribution, or maybe prefers not to but have the possibility. This means the dependence on someone else to learn more about dancing is gone. The Emancipated dancer might play for the same team as the absent choreographer.