‘Annotation and choreographic self-awareness’

ABSTRACT

Through my doctoral research I developed a form of annotation and analysis of works to explore experiences of emotion in contemporary theatre dance. This approach helped me analyse works by different choreographers and share my spectatorial experience of them. To explore whether the work had emotional information embodied in its perceptual properties, I analysed movement qualities, movement-music, and spatial-rhythm. Through these analysis I was able to understand aspects of my process which were not obvious before. The analysis seemed to improve my choreographic self- awareness. Scholars such as Sarah Whatley have pointed at the potential of documenting, sharing, and curating information about choreographic practices, and its use as feedback tool for the choreographers [Whatley, Sarah. 2018. “Enhancing Choreographic Objects; Traces, Texts and Tales of a Journey Through Dance.” In Performing Process Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice, edited by Hetty Blades and Emma Meehan, 67–80. Bristol: Intellect]. But what happens when the analyst and the choreographer are the same person? For me, the process became a form of self-discovery. This article is a reflection on the difficulties, implications, and repercussions of undertaking a systematic analysis/annotation of my work, especially in relation to emotion.

KEYWORDS:

• Dance
• choreography
• scholar-practitioner
• experience
• annotation
• self-awareness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I made Petrichor in 2016 with the five apprentice dancers of ŻfinMalta Dance Ensemble (since then renamed ŻfinMalta – National Dance Company). The work was a 17-minute long piece, which was then restaged for the main ŻfinMalta company in 2017 for 11 dancers and in 2018 for 10 dancers.

2 Although some of these models were developed a long time ago, they still present the clearest and most widely acknowledged analytical power in these particular properties. At the same time, I acknowledge that they had theoretical frameworks which were at best problematic (such as Laban’s understanding that particular meanings or emotions could be created through particular combinations of weight, time, and space use).

3 I use the term ‘emotional import’ to characterise what the work of dance conveys, understanding it as the different impressions of emotion which can be experienced through it. These cannot be identified with one particular emotion or mood. The spectator’s experience of emotional import is an aspect of the phenomenal experience of dance works, grounded in bodily and cognitive responses, and it emerges from the properties of the work of dance as perceived by the spectator. The term emotional import then serves the purpose of referring to what a dance work conveys emotionally, and as it is understood as relational, it can be accessed through the effect which a work of dance has on a spectator. This effect, I argue, is not necessarily the same as a fully-fledged emotion, in that it does not have a conative or a behavioural element of the same strength, nor does it have an object towards which it is directed.

4 Laban’s is a clear, systematic tool, but it requires extensive training usually outside the reach or interest of most choreographers, hence failing to be manageable. That said, the parts of the system used here, and their understanding as tools and not categorisation, are potentially useful for the creative process.

5 Perhaps it is worth noting here that at the moment many choreographers do develop their own systems and languages, shared with the dancers they work with regularly. How systematic this approach is, however, depends on the particular choreographer/company.

6 The recordings in these cases are of live performances in which at least two cameras are used, except in the recording of my work where there is a single camera. This indicates editing, which renders the experience of watching somehow different, and the recording is then not a straight case of documentation. That said, the video remains the best tool in terms of analysis, and it is not here argued to be an equivalent experience to the live one.

7 Because of the nature of the work, these two lines of research would always be entangled in an iterative feedback process. This was also the way the research was developed in the first instance, and it is necessary that it continues to do so.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucía Piquero-Alvarez

Lucía Piquero Alvarez trained in classical ballet and read for a BSc in Psychology in Spain. She then followed contemporary dance training at The Place, London, a MA in Choreography at Middlesex University, and completed her PhD at Roehampton University in 2019. She is currently head of the Dance Studies Department at the University of Malta. She researches embodied and enactive cognition and the experience of emotion in dance. She has presented her research and her choreographic work internationally, including several conferences, commissions, residencies, and collaborations. She has also directed several choreographic practice-as-research projects.