Moving across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Erin Brannigan, Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century (Sydney: Currency House, Platform Paper 25, 2010) In Currency Press's quarterly Platform Papers series, invited authors, writing for an engaged general readership, put forward a position on current issues and developments with implications for performing artists and arts policy. It is one of the few local forums through which important issues concerning the performing arts can be debated in a timely way. Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century raises some interesting and important issues, but following the overall argument is not easy. I think that this is partly because the premise of the essay, focused as it is around the idea of 'disciplinarity', is already 'interdisciplinary' in the sense that these terms - and a strong interdisciplinary agenda - come out of academia rather than being assumed to pertain to dance practice without some contextualising, explanation or justification. Interdisciplinarity is promoted in universities and in university-based research because, potentially, it can help to overcome the lack of holistic perspectives in the highly specialised areas of analysis and knowledge that have developed and come down to us since the European Enlightenment.Brannigan's Introduction sets out to give evidence for her claim that at 'the beginning of the twenty- first century, contemporary dance is an interdisciplinary art form' (2). Examples of works and artists bringing 'dance together with theatre . . . new media and film . . . and with design' (2) are cited from Europe, the United States and Australia, and thus the author seems to be saying that contemporary dance in Australia and elsewhere is abreast, and an important driver, of a broader 'tendency toward interdisciplinarity in current creative practice' in the arts overall (5); and with these examples she seems to suggest that 'interdisciplinarity' here means work and works that bring different artists and/or art forms together on a common project.She goes on to ask what makes a performance or work within this context of interdisciplinarity specifically a dance: in other words, what is/was the basis of dance's 'disciplinarity'? She questions the idea that dance was established as a discrete discipline during the twentieth century through a process of 'purification' - the removal of elements and concerns extraneous to 'movement' - because socalled pure dance artists such as Merce Cunningham also had visual artists and composers contribute to their performances. She proposes instead that it is not a primary emphasis on manifest movement that defines the 'discipline' of dance but that a work or practice is based in a developed 'somatic intelligence', which might appear in many forms.I take Brannigan here to be making the important point that the question of whether a work or performance is 'interdisciplinary' or not - if that means that it involves a genuine mixing of art forms - can't be decided simply at the level of the 'spectacular elements'. A superficial look at whether or not a performance manifestly involves dancing, film, set, music, tells us nothing about whether there has been work at the corporeal level to create what the critic Laurence Louppe calls an ecriture - that is, whether the 'writing' of the performance text in its originality is done in the dancers' bodies. This would constitute the dance 'disciplinarity' upon which a movement 'across' (other) disciplines might be based. Gideon Obarzanek is one of the artists whose work Branningan discusses as representing an 'interdisciplinary' approach to making performances but whose interdisciplinary works are, according to her, 'driven' by dance. Other artists mentioned are Lucy Guerin, Helen Herbertson, Sue Healy, Julie-Ann Long, Dean Walsh. However, now that Obarzanek has signalled his retirement from Chunky Move, I think that it is useful to consider what he leaves behind as a legacy: that is, what remains other than the company's administration and its board. …

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