playful performance

In three weeks Steve Paxton re-envisioned his performance Ave Nue together with 10 SNDO (School for New Dance Development) students. A very short period for such a project. So what did it bring us? The starting point of Ave Nue was not the movement, it was the space: a long hallway dissected in parts by pillars. Colourful pillars. Paxton decided that in stead of a gradual green-to-white hallway, which was used in the original piece in Brussels, he wanted the pillars to have the colours of the rainbow. This is the first major difference between Ave Nue 1985 and the re-envisioned Ave Nue 2009.¹

I visited the performance twice, during the dress rehearsal and the premiere. This article reports my experience of the piece by reflecting on both these performance and the rehearsals I visited in the weeks before. My aim is not to compare the two performances I saw, or to compare the 2009 version with the original one. I will try to give an overview of what Ave Nue was and has become.

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Dit is de eerste brief in een lopende correspondentie tussen Joris Weijdom en Jochem Naafs. Klik hier voor een overzicht van deze correspondentie.

On December 6 and 7 Danslab organised Frame, a two day gathering of choreographers on artistic research, or if you wish: artistic explorative processes. To discuss this topic Danslab proposed to take two (related) types of knowledge as a starting point: embodied knowledge and subjective knowledge. Danslab asked me and two other students in Theatre Studies to join this discussion and write a report. You can read a small teaser here:

Processing Dance
Thinking outside the Frame – Research on choreographic research
By Jochem Naafs

Who defines the product?
What defines the product?
What is the knowledge of dance?

Why would these questions come up if you put about 25 choreographers and dance scholars in one room? I am not sure. Maybe it is because dance is not in any way really tangible. Dance is temporarily. This article reports my thinking and feeling during and after Frame – Research on Choreographic Research. My thoughts have been leading me towards the question what a choreographic product and choreographic knowledge is and can be.

Download the full report (.pdf).

The reports of Nina Aalders and Anoek Nuyens are available on the website of Danslab.