Transference and Transition in Systems of Dance Generation

Abstract

In “Transference and transition in systems of dance generation”, Pil Hansen engages Karen Kaeja and Ame Henderson's voices to analyze the dramaturgical strategies of dance generation, that these choreographers have developed in response to, respectively, physical trauma and hierarchical divides in dance.

Hansen turns to Dynamical Systems Theory and draws upon insights from the creation processes of Kaeja's Crave and Henderson's relay to uncover the ways in which autobiographical memories were transferred from their original sources and adapted within self-organizing systems of task- and game-based generation. Hansen proposes that the dancers' attentive pursuit of intimate or leaderless togetherness within these systems changed the parameters that rendered impossible such close proximity. In turn, this change funnelled the systems' self-organizing dynamics into turbulent states of phase transition with a promise of new—though impermanent—orders that made a form of togetherness possible. She, furthermore, proposes that this potential and possibility lives in the process of continued pursuit within an ongoing dynamic and cannot be predicted or realized as an end state of the systems. In concert, the dramaturgical strategies were not concerned with transference and transition as preparation for a predetermined and repeatable performance outcome, transference and transition were pursued as necessarily turbulent mechanisms of ongoing generation that continue to be presented and performed for shifting audiences.

Notes

¹This theory and method has evolved from Kelso's and Hagen's classical model for the dynamics of limb coordination from 1985 (see Haken 1987; Kelso 1995; Fuchs and Jirsa 2008) into two different approaches: 1) a mathematical approach for the calculation and visual representation of complex systems’ self-organizing patterns; and 2) a both qualitative and quantitative method for the analysis of human behaviour. The second approach was initially proposed by Esther Thelen and Linda Smith in 1994 as a method to analyze the development of cognition and action in early childhood and later used by Timothy van Gelder to argue against a computational model of the mind (van Gelder 1995; Port 1995).