Jealousy, Transmission and Recovery

Abstract

Recovery is a performance project by Natalie Cursio and Shannon Bott that premiered in Melbourne, Australia in late 2015. In the credits I am listed as ‘Director / Choreographer’ but I was not involved at the beginning of the project and nor did I see the premiere. My relative absence from Recovery has led me to conceive of my relationship to it as being that of a jealous lover. In turn, I ask how the experience of jealousy may be useful in re-negotiating the role of the choreographer—and choreography—through time. The writing evokes the biological metaphor of 'spillover' to help imagine a work's persistence beyond performance (and related considerations of annotation and archive), and proposes that the idea of stewardship helps to recognize the limited role of the director/choreographer in how performance is transmitted through time.

Notes

1 There have been a number of recent high-profile dance archives, including Motion Bank (Forsythe 2010), and its initial outcome Synchronous Objects (Forsythe et al. 2009), Siobhan Davies RePlay (Davies and Whatley 2009), Merce Cunningham: 65 Years (Vaughan et al. 2012) and A Choreographer's Score by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Bojana Cvejić (2012).

2 See, for example, Reason (2006), Lepecki (2010) and Jones and Heathfield (2012).

3 My use of the word ‘stewardship’ was provoked by its use in an entirely different context – the care of the natural world – in Randall Szott's blog, Lebenskünstler (2013).

4 John F. Simon's work was discussed by Xiaoying Yuan in response to a discussion on ‘Issues surrounding “Object” and the process-based art curating in music and sound’ (New-Media-Curating listserv 2015).