To name

To document something we do is also to say I did that, there is a proof.

The document is usually a proof we did something, and as you all seem to recognize and admit, the document is subjective, always a point of view. I agree, there is a contradiction. There is an appeal to work on the idea of false document, the lie. The documentation of an event that never occured, the boasting of an event, document a conspiracy.

If the document is a proof, a witness, it is also from that moment going to be a reference. The reference allows us to connect things together. The multiplication of references make ideas look old. This is the contradiction of avant-garde. Since avant-garde is not anymore, not even exotic anymore, we are afraid of naming things and therefore I see a lot of the same thing being repeated but continuously altered with the color of the day, giving it a false new look. I see an avoidance of documentation in the fear that if it is documented, it might become clear that it is not as new as it was represented to be. The connection between works would become clearer and detract from their perceived originality.

The incursion of somatics in dance (Body Mind Centering, Alexander, Skinner Release...), techniques now largely used in dance is symptomatic of the end of the idea of the invented movement, as moderns (Graham, Humphrey, Limon...) were exploring. The Graham technique has a trade mark and the company tried in the past to restrict the use of this technique to themselves, with not much success. But dancers now rarely only train in a unique technique. Somatics focuses on fundamental possibilities of human movement in very detailed ways. They have been so popular because it allows dancers to navigate between techniques and approach a variety of movement and traditions with more comfort and safety. Most of the movements are now found and chosen, they are "ready-mades", they belong to the mass, to everybody.

The distance between the ready-made on stage performed by a dancer and the one experienced by people in real life is still huge, a gap that would be interesting to document.

Maybe choreography classes shouldn't be oriented towards invention of movement, towards the creation of "vocabulary". There is more interesting ways to approach choreography. Instead of creating dance, it is about creating a way of creating dance, these are scores and there is infinite room for creating new scores.

I am interested to explore ownership in dance, in performing existing scores that have been documented.

One of the beautiful score of Lia Rodrigues, an extraordinary choreographer and thinker living in Rio, Brazil. The score is simple but difficult to do. You have to enumerate every movement you do in the most detailed way, in real time.

Reconstitute a part of Trio A (Yvonne Rainer) from documents.

There is a guy who wrote a choreography, in a form of a book, and this book has been published and the choreography performed by various companies. His name is Thomas Lehman, a Berlin-based German choreographer. The book is called "Schreibstück". I should have a copy soon.

Scores of the Fluxus group.

any more ideas ?

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